THE    PRINCIPLES    OF 
ENGLISH    VERSE 


CHARLTON    M.    LEWIS 

Emily  Sanford  Professor  of  English  Literature 
in  Yale  University 


^    or  TH£ 

UNIVERSITY 

or 


NEW  YORK 
HENRY   HOLT  AND   COMPANY 

1907 


Copyright,    1006 

BY 

HENRY    HOLT   AND   COMPANY 


Published,  June,  1906 
Reprinted,  January,  1907 


PREFACE 

THIS  little  book  is  designed  chiefly  for  "gen- 
eral readers."  To  such  persons  as  enjoy 
poetry,  but  think  they  might  enjoy  it  more  if 
they  found  its  metrical  structure  less  bewilder- 
ing, I  think  I  may  safely  promise  material  as- 
sistance and  satisfaction.  English  metres  are 
very  complicated  in  detail,  but  their  funda- 
mental principles  are  simple;  and  a  knowledge 
of  the  fundamental  principles  is  sufficient  for 
sympathetic  appreciation. 

My  statement  of  these  principles  will  also,  I 
trust,  be  of  interest  to  scholars  and  professional 
metrists.  They  will  readily  detect  my  indebted- 
ness to  many  former  students  of  versification, 
but  they  will  also  find  some  things  that  are  new 
both  in  theory  and  in  method.  My  obligations 
are  so  obvious,  and  at  the  same  time  so  general 
in  character,  that  it  is  both  unnecessary  and  im- 
practicable to  specify  them  all ;  but  it  is  proper 

iii 


154964 


iv  Preface 

to  say  that  but  for  an  old  essay  (now  too  much 
neglected)  by  Coventry  Patmore,  and  a  sugges- 
tion once  casually  made  in  conversation  by  my 
colleague,  Professor  Goodell,  this  book  might 
not  have  been  written. 

The  principles  of  verse  belong  partly  to 
science  and  partly  to  art.  If  I  were  writing 
only  of  science  I  should  prefer  to  write  im- 
personally ;  but  as  it  is  I  have  made  free  use  of 
the  personal  pronoun,  thinking  it  best  to  dis- 
tinguish clearly  between  conclusions  based  on 
scientific  reasoning  and  conclusions  based  on 

individual  taste. 

C.  M.  L. 

YALE  UNIVERSITY,  1906, 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.    RHYTHM  AND  METRE, 1 

II.     THE  PENTAMETER  LIKE,            ....  19 

III.     BLANK  VERSE,             45 

IV.     RIMED   PENTAMETERS, 65 

V.     MISCELLANEOUS    METRES, 91 

VI.    EMBELLISHMENTS  OF  VERSE,      ....  125 


THE  PRINCIPLES  OF 
ENGLISH  VERSE 

CHAPTER  I 

TRbgtbm  anD  /iBette 

IF  you  pronounce  these  two  sentences:  "She 
told  me  she  was  sixteen  years  of  age,"  and 
"She  said  her  age  was  just  sixteen,"  you  will 
almost  certainly  pronounce  "sixteen"  with  the 
accent  on  "six"  in  the  first  case  and  on  " — teen" 
in  the  second.  So  when  you  say  "That  judg- 
ment was  unjust,"  you  put  a  marked  accent  on 
the  final  syllable  of  the  adjective,  but  when  you 
speak  of  "the  parable  of  the  unjust  steward," 
you  probably  give  its  two  syllables  nearly  equal 
weight.  There  are  many  other  English  words 
whose  accentuation  varies  according  to  circum- 
stances, and  the  reason  is  that  we  instinctively 
try  to  speak  rhythmically.  Before  we  can  un- 


2  English  Verse 

derstand  the  structure  of  English  verse  we  must 
pay  some  attention  to  the  nature  and  workings 
of  this  instinct,  for  verse  is  only  an  elaboration 
and  refinement  of  our  instinctive  mode  of  ex- 
pression ;  and  before  we  can  enter  upon  even  this 
examination,  we  must  ask  ourselves  what  is 
rhythm? 

I  Rhythm  may  be  roughly  defined  as  a  recur- 
rence of  similar  phenomena  at  regular  intervals 
\of  time.  No  word  less  general  than  phenomena 
would  suffice  for  the  purposes  of  definition.  The 
rhythm  of  verse  or  music,  to  be  sure,  is  com- 
monly found  in  the  recurrence  of  similar  sounds ; 
but  these  are  special  cases,  and  sound  is  not 
essential  to  rhythm.  A  deaf  man  can  see  the 
rhythm  of  a  pendulum,  and  indeed  a  man  de- 
prived of  all  five  senses  could  feel  the  rhythmic 
swaying  of  a  railway  train.  But  while  in  the 
first  part  of  the  definition  it  is  safest  to  be 
vague,  in  the  last  part  it  is  necessary  to  be  in- 
sistently specific.  Regularity  of  time-intervals 
is  a  sine  qua  non  of  rhythm.  The  fact  needs  no 
proof,  for  it  is  obvious;  but  it  deserves  some 
emphasis,  because  many  persons  have  never  ob- 


Rhythm  and  Metre  3 

served  it,  and  it  is  a  fundamental  principle  in 
the  whole  theory  of  verse. 

Now  to  rhythm  in  this  sense  we  have  an  in- 
stinctive leaning.  When  you  drive  a  nail,  you 
swing  your  hammer  rhythmically.  When  you 
walk  or  run,  your  steps  are  rhythmical,  and  you 
would  find  it  very  disagreeable  to  walk  in  any 
other  way.  Your  respiration,  the  movement  of 
your  jaw  in  chewing,  and  that  of  your  hands 
when  you  rub  down  after  a  bath,  or  when  you 
brush  your  teeth, — all  are  rhythmical.  Stu- 
dents of  the  subject  who  are  sentimentally  in- 
clined have  noted  also  the  rhythms  of  inanimate 
nature,  in  the  ocean  billows,  the  swaying  of 
trees,  the  revolution  of  the  earth,  and  the  proc- 
esses of  the  suns ;  and  they  have  seen  in  all  these 
phenomena  one  of  the  mysterious  harmonies  of 
the  universe.  There  is  indeed  much  suggestion 
here  for  philosophy  and  for  poetry,  but  an 
elementary  scientific  explanation  of  our  human 
instinct  will  suffice  for  present  purposes.  Such 
an  explanation,  of  course,  is  found  in  the  prin- 
ciple of  economy.  The  reason  why  we  walk 
rhythmically  is  that  the  momentum  of  the  body 


4  English  Verse 

would  make  an  unrhythmical  gait  compara- 
tively laborious.  We  strike  rhythmical  blows 
with  a  hammer  because  we  can  do  so  almost 
automatically.  There  is  here  no  apparent 
economy  of  physical  force,  but  there  is  a  great 
economy  of  attention.  We  can  breathe  ir- 
regularly without  any  special  muscular  effort, 
but  as  soon  as  we  stop  thinking  about  it  our 
chests  begin  to  move  rhythmically  again. 

It  is  an  inevitable  result  of  this  economical 
instinct  of  ours  that  we  tend  also  to  speak 
rhythmically.  In  every  sentence  that  we  utter 
there  are  certain  words  or  syllables  that  are 
more  important  than  the  others, — certain  syl- 
lables which  are  in  the  foreground  of  our 
thought  and  which  we  therefore  pronounce  with 
greater  emphasis ;  and  our  instinctive  tendency 
is  to  separate  those  syllables,  in  speaking,  by 
regular  intervals  of  time.  In  any  simple  com- 
monplace of  conversation  we  speak  rhythmically 
if  we  conveniently  can.  Thus  when  you  ask 
"How  do  you  do  this  morning?"  you  probably 
emphasize  the  syllables  how,  do,  and  morn ;  and 
though  between  the  first  two  of  these  there  are 


Rhythm  and  Metre  5 

two  unemphasized  syllables,  while  between  the 
last  two  there  is  only  one,  yet  you  allow  no  more 
time  for  the  two  than  for  the  one.  You  hurry 
over  them  so  as  to  reach  the  emphatic  syllable  at 
the  proper  time;  and  then  you  make  a  slight 
pause  and  pronounce  the  word  "this"  just  the 
least  bit  more  slowly,  so  as  not  to  reach  the  next 
emphatic  syllable  too  soon. 

Suppose  you  ask  the  question  in  a  mood  of 
somewhat  warmer  cordiality,  and  so  emphasize 
the  second  word  instead  of  the  first ; — "How  do 
you  do  this  morning?"  You  will  still  speak  the 
whole  sentence  rhythmically;  but  in  order  to 
make  it  rhythmical  you  will  pronounce  the  word 
"you"  in  a  somewhat  more  deliberate  manner 
than  before,  in  order  to  leave  an  adequate  in- 
terval before  the  second  "do." 

Try  now  pronouncing  a  sentence  of  slightly 
different  form: — "You  are  a  bad  man."  You 
emphasize  three  words,  namely  you,  bad,  and 
man,  and  between  the  last  two  of  these  there  are 
no  unstressed  syllables;  but  do  you  not  still 
maintain  a  regular  rhythm?  You  do  so  by 
dwelling  on  the  "bad"  long  enough  to  fill  up  the 


6  English  Verse 

rhythmical  gap.  If  you  substitute  the  word 
wicked  for  bad  you  will  not  allow  it  any  more 
time  in  the  utterance ;  and  even  if  you  say  "You 
are  a  marvelous  man"  you  will  still  preserve  the 
same  rhythm  in  your  sentence.  This  is  not  be- 
cause the  word  bad  is  in  itself  as  long  a  word 
as  marvelous,  for  it  obviously  is  not;  it  is  be- 
cause of  your  instinct  for  rhythm.  If  now  you 
try  still  another  change,  substituting  astonish- 
ing for  marvelous,  you  will  find,  perhaps,  that 
the  whole  sentence  requires  more  time  than  it  did 
in  its  original  form ;  but  your  instinct  will  still 
be  to  equalize  its  two  parts.  You  will  hurry 
over  the  syllables  "you  are  an  as — "  a  little  bit 
faster  than  you  hurried  before;  and  you  will 
either  leave  a  pause  that  is  just  barely  percepti- 
ble after  "astonishing"  or  else  dwell  ever  so 
slightly  upon  the  nasal  sound  in  which  that  word 
ends.  Probably  your  instinct,  in  this  case,  will 
not  fully  satisfy  itself,  and  the  sentence  will  be 
only  approximately  rhythmical ;  but  you  will  at 
least  have  made  an  unconscious  effort  towards 
regularity. 

I  have  spoken  of  our  instinct  for  rhythm  as 


Rhythm  and  Metre  7 

scientifically  traceable  to  the  principle  of  econ- 
omy. In  the  particular  department  of  speech 
it  does  not  seem  that  a  very  great  economy  of 
attention  is  attained  by  rhythmical  utterance, 
and  it  is  probably  true  that  if  this  were  an 
isolated  activity  no  rhythmical  instinct  would 
have  been  developed  in  it.  But  no  human 
activity  is  isolated.  In  one  kind  of  work  we 
profit  by  experience  in  other  kinds;  and  the 
human  race,  in  its  long  evolution,  has  from  the 
principle  of  economy  developed  a  universal 
aesthetic  impulse.  From  our  primeval  ancestors, 
groping  vaguely  through  dark  centuries  of  un- 
conscious experiment,  we  have  inherited  a  "love" 
of  rhythm ;  and  this  love  of  rhythm,  this  craving 
for  regularity  in  the  time-intervals  between  our 
muscular  or  mental  efforts,  is  what  causes  the 
rhythm  of  speech. 

Now  this  rhythm  is  not  perfect.  If  you 
tested  your  speech  with  the  delicate  measuring 
instruments  of  a  psychologist's  laboratory,  you 
would  find  it  only  approximately  rhythmical. 
The  instinct  is  satisfied  by  a  mere  approach  to 
regularity.  If,  moreover,  instead  of  consider- 


8  English  Verse 

ing  short  detached  sentences  like  those  presented 
above,  you  examine  your  manner  of  pronouncing 
long  paragraphs  of  speech,  you  will  find  that 
your  fluency  is  here  and  there  interrupted  by 
irregular  pauses,  or  accelerations,  or  retards. 
If  you  open  casually  such  a  book  as  a  Latin 
grammar  or  a  text-book  in  geometry  and  read 
a  paragraph  or  two,  your  utterance  may  hardly 
be  rhythmical  at  all,  for  the  sentences  upon 
which  you  try  the  experiment  may  be  so  dis- 
jointed and  fragmentary  as  to  offer  little  op- 
portunity to  your  rhythmical  instinct ;  but 
prose  of  more  dignified  and  literary  character 
you  will  generally  find  markedly  rhythmical, 
when  read  in  a  perfectly  natural  manner.  There 
will  be  many  irregularities,  but  they  will  be  no 
more  than  interruptions;  and  between  them 
your  utterance  will  tend  to  resume  its  normal 
regularity  of  flow,  even  though  this  regularity 
be  often  only  approximate.  j> 

For  a  specific  example  of  the  interrupted 
rhythm  of  ordinary  prose,  I  quote  from  the  ex- 
cellent little  manual  of  English  Versification  by 
Mr.  James  C.  Parsons.  "In  prose,  the  words 


Rhythm  and  Metre  9 

generally  follow  any  order  which  most  naturally 
expresses  the  thought,  without  regard  to  the 
number  or  frequency  of  the  accents.  Thus,  in 
this  sentence  from  Dickens'  Old  Curiosity  Shop ; 
'Night  is  generally  my  time  for  walking;  save 
in  the  country,  I  seldom  go  out  until  after  dark.' 
Here  no  regularity  is  observable  in  the  occur- 
rence of  the  stress.  This  is  simple  prose." 
Mr.  Parsons  uses  this  sentence  to  show  the  un- 
rhythmical  character  of  ordinary  prose,  as  dis- 
tinguished from  the  rhythmical  character  of 
verse;  for  he  thinks  that  verse  differs  from 
prose  "chiefly  in  a  certain  regularity  of  move- 
ment .  .  .  called  rhythm."  But  in  the  very 
passage  which  he  cites  to  prove  the  difference, 
is  there  not  as  regular  a  rhythm  as  in  ordinary 
verse? 

The  fact  is  that  Mr.  Parsons,  like  other  me- 
trists,  is  mistaken  in  supposing  that  rhythm  is  a 
distinguishing  feature  of  verse.  Verse  is  no 
more  truly  rhythmical  than  prose.  In  neither 
form  of  speech  is  the  rhythm  perfect,  and  in 
prose  it  is  likely  to  be  even  more  irregular  and 
disjointed  than  it  is  in  verse;  but  it  is  a  prop- 


10  English  Verse 

erty  of  both.  The  distinguishing  feature  of 
verse  is  not  rhythm,  but  metre;  and  we  must 
next  form  a  clear  notion  of  the  difference  be- 
tween the  two. 

For  a  convenient  illustration  I  will  take  a  fine 
old  sentence  from  the  Book  of  Genesis,  a  charac- 
teristic specimen  of  the  beautiful  rhythmical 
prose  of  our  King  James  version;  and  I  will 
mark  with  an  accent  those  syllables  which  I  my- 
self would  naturally  emphasize.  "And  God  saw 
that  the  wickedness  of  man- was  great  in  the 
earth,  and  that  every  imagination  of  the 
thoughts  of  his  heart  was  only  evil  continually." 
I  do  not  pretend  that  my  way  of  reading^this 
passage  is  the  only  way,  or  even  the  best  way ; 
but  as  it  is  certainly  not  unnatural,  ancl  as  it 
probably  does  not  differ  materially  f fdm  other 
people's  ways,  I  venture  to  explain  it  in  detail. 
My  reading  is  satisfyingly  rhythmical, — that 
is  to  say,  it  leaves  between  the  accented  syl- 
lables intervals  either  exactly  or  very  nearly 
equal, — down  to  the  word  "earth";  there  I 
make  a  relatively  long  pause ;  but  I  afterwards 
\  resume  my  former  regularity  of  utterance,  and 


Rhythm  and  Metre  1 1 

continue  it  to  the  end.  The  sentence  is  thus 
divided  into  two  main  rhythmical  periods.  I 
wish  to  call  special  attention  to  this  division, 
because  it  is  of  considerable  importance,  and  the 
expression  "rhythmical  period"  will  recur  again 
and  again  in  this  book. 

I  have  admitted  that  others  would  read  this 
sentence  differently.  Some  persons,  for  in- 
stance, would  make  a  slight  pause  after  the 
word  "man" ;  and  a  few,  perhaps,  would  pause 
there  long  enough  to  make  a  distinct  break  in 
the  rhythm,  so  that  the  words  "And  God  saw 
that  the  wickedness  of  man"  might  constitute  a 
distinct  rhythmical  period,  while  the  words  "was 
great  in  the  earth"  would  constitute  a  second. 
Many  readers,  I  am  sure,  would  pause  in  this 
way  after  the  word  "heart"  in  the  second  mem- 
ber of  the  sentence;  and  perhaps  others  again 
would  separate  their  rhythmical  periods  in  still 
other  ways.  But  these  are  matters  of  detail. 
The  essential  fact,  which  I  am  sure  cannot  be 
seriously  disputed,  is  that  every  one  will  read 
the  sentence  rhythmically,  separating  those 
syllables  upon  which  he  lays  stress  by  ap- 


12  English  Verse 

proximately  equal  intervals  of  time,  except 
where  by  pausing  for  breath  or  for  emphasis  he 
makes  an  end  of  one  rhythmical  period  and  be- 
gins another. 

But  while  this  sentence  is  rhythmical,  it  is  far 
from  metrical.  Between  the  stressed  syllables 
there  are  sometimes  two  that  are  unstressed, 
sometimes  only  one,  and  sometimes  three.  In 
one  case  there  are  actually  five  ("every  imagina- 
tion"), and  in  another  ("God  saw")  there  are 
none  at  all.  There  is  no  fixed  proportion  be- 
tween the  number  of  stressed  and  the  number  of 
unstressed  syllables;  the  rhythm  of  prose  is 
governed  by  no  numerical  law.  In  metre,  as  its 
name  implies,  the  number  of  syllables  is  meas- 
ured with  more  or  less  strictness.  In  the  com- 
monest kinds  of  English  verse  there  is  a  fairly 
regular  alternation  of  stressed  and  unstressed 
syllables,  so  that  exactly  ten  syllables  are 
usually  found  in  a  verse  of  five  stresses ;  in  some 
other  forms  of  verse  there  are  exactly  two  syl- 
lables without  stress  for  every  one  that  is 
stressed;  while  in  others  again  the  number 
varies  from  one  to  two,  or  perhaps  even  more 


Rhythm  and  Metre  1 3 

widely ;  but  in  all  there  must  be  enough  regular- 
ity to  convey  a  sense  of  measure  and  propor- 
tion, or  the  verse  is  not  verse  at  all,  it  is  merely 
prose. 

Furthermore,  our  sentence  from  Genesis  could 
not  be  printed  in  lines  of  equal  length,  nor  in- 
deed in  lines  which  in  length  and  rhythmical 
structure  should  bear  any  regular  relation  to 
each  other,  without  grotesque  results.  If  we 
wished  to  turn  the  passage  into  verse,  we  should 
have  to  alter  it  not  only  by  introducing  some 
regularity  into  the  alternation  of  stressed  and 
unstressed  syllables,  but  also  by  contriving  some 
sort  of  division  into  lines,  or  individual  verses, 
which  should  bear  some  numerical  relation  to 
each  other,  and  which  should  end  at  least  with 
the  ends  of  words,  if  not  with  the  ends  of  rhyth- 
mical periods.  Let  us  try  the  experiment. 

And  God  then  saw  the  wickedness  of  man 
Was  great  upon  the  earth,  and  that  his  heart 
Imagined  only  evil  all  the  time. 

Of  course  I  have  weakened  the  passage  shame- 
fully, turning  glorious  prose  into  very  ordinary 
verse;  but  the  verse  is  not  positively  bad  even 


14  English  Verse 

from  the  artistic  point  of  view ;  and  scientifically 
it  is  entirely  correct.  It  is  not  more  rhythmical 
than  the  prose  sentence,  but  it  is  rigidly  and 
mechanically  metrical.* 

Now  in  verse  as  in  prose  it  must  be  observed 
that  our  instinct  does  not  demand  exact  equality 
of  the  time-intervals.  If  a  critic  should  force 
our  definition  of  rhythm  upon  us  with  verbal 
minuteness,  we  might  have  to  say  that  verse, 
like  prose,  is  not  really  rhythmical  at  all,  that  it 
only  approximates  rhythm ;  but  as  our  present 
aim  is  a  practical  understanding  of  verse  rather 
than  a  scientific  definition,  I  shall  permit  myself 
to  use  words  with  some  looseness.  I  shall  speak 
of  verse,  therefore,  as  rhythmical ;  yet,  even  at 
the  risk  of  Hibernianism,  I  shall  at  the  same 
time  insist  that  the  essence  of  rhythm  is  equality, 
but  that  in  verse,  as  in  prose,  absolute  equality 
is  often  not  present. 

Indeed,  to  read  verse  in  perfectly  even  time 
would  be  to  make  it  insufferably  monotonous. 
Children  recite  their  Mother  Goose  in  this  way, 

*A  metrical  peculiarity  of  the  first  line  will  be  consid- 
ered in  the  next  chapter. 


Rhythm  and  Metre  15 

because  their  instinct  is  strong  and  crude;  but 
older  persons  are  repelled  rather  than  attracted 
by  that  kind  of  sing-song,  and  much  of  the 
beauty  of  verse,  to  a  refined  taste,  is  due  to  the 
perpetual  checks  and  accelerations  with  which 
its  rhythm  is  varied.  These  checks  and  accelera- 
tions are  frequently  introduced  by  ourselves,  as 
we  read,  and  are  symptoms  of  our  own  varying 
emotional  sympathy  and  interest;  but  often, 
too,  they  are  necessitated  by  the  very  words  of 
the  text,  and  are  manifestations  of  the  poet's 
art.  Here,  for  example,  are  two  lines  from 
Tennyson's  Ulysses : 

The  long  day  wanes;  the  slow  moon  climbs;  the  deep 
Moans  round  with  many  voices.    Come,  my  friends. 

Even  the  childish  lover  of  sing-song  would 
hardly  read  these  verses  in  strictly  even  time.  A 
person  of  mature  years  realizes  that  much 
of  their  beauty  is  due  to  the  irregularity  of 
their  tempo.  But  the  essential  fact  about 
these,  as  about  all  lines  of  verse,  is  that 
the  principle  of  regularity  underlies  them 
throughout. 


1 6  English  Verse 

We  touch  here  upon  one  of  the  fundamentals 
of  aesthetics,  a  general  law  which  in  some  form 
or  other  is  found  enforcing  itself  everywhere  in 
the  arts  of  music  and  poetry, — if  not,  indeed,  in 
all  the  arts.  As  we  are  not  at  present  con- 
cerned with  the  general  principles  of  aesthetics, 
I  shall  not  try  to  state  this  law  in  general  terms, 
but  will  only  indicate,  from  time  to  time,  its 
applications  to  verse.  For  purposes  of  con- 
venient reference  we  may  call  it  the  law  of  con- 
flict, and  in  so  far  as  it  applies  to  the  particular 
matter  in  hand  it  is  as  follows. 

In  reading  (or  writing)  verse  we  are  guided 

,' ,    by  our  instinct  for  strict  equality  in  time-inter- 

/r 

vals,  and  deep  down  below  our  conscious  minds 

there  is  a  sense  of  an  ideal  rhythmical  scheme, 
in  which  the  time-intervals  are  exactly  equal. 
The  actual  movement  of  the  verse  does  not  ex- 
actly correspond  with  this  ideal  scheme ;  it  plays 
all  about  it,  swaying  back  and  forth  like  a 
pendulum,  perhaps,  now  behind  and  now  ahead 
of  the  ideal;  but  it  never  wholly  forsakes  it. 
The  pleasure  which  verse  gives  to  an  educated 
taste  is  partly  due  to  this  perpetual  conflict  be- 


Rhythm  and  Metre  17 

tween  the  actual  and  the  ideal.     Sometimes  for 
i 

a  while  the  verse  moves  in  even  step  with  the 
ideal  scheme,  but  surely  sooner  or  later  it  breaks 
away ;  the  poet's  language,  or  the  feeling  stirred 
by  his  thought,  proves  a  little  too  strong  for  our 
rhythmical  instinct,  and  escapes  from  the  fet- 
ters ;  but  the  instinct  has  not  been  quelled,  and  it 
speedily  asserts  itself  again. 

This,  after  all,  is  a  matter  of  comparatively 
small  importance  just  here;  but  I  point  it  out 
because  in  later  chapters  this  same  law  of  con- 
flict will  prove  of  very  great  importance,  and  it 
is  well  to  be  familiar  with  it  in  its  crudest 
manifestation.  It  is  worth  noting,  also,  that 
all  that  I  have  said  thus  far  about  the  law  ap- 
plies to  prose  just  as  well  as  to  verse.  Inasmuch 
as  the  rhythms  of  prose  are  in  some  respects  less 
simple  than  those  of  verse,  persons  whose  ears 
are  particularly  sensitive  to  these  manifesta- 
tions of  the  law  (and  perhaps  less  so  to  others 
which  we  shall  consider  later)  find  a  keener 
delight  in  the  sensuous  qualities  of  prose  than  in 
those  of  verse.  I  myself,  while  I  regard  verse 
as  the  highest  known  form  of  expression,  admit 


1 8  English  Verse 

that  in  some  respects  prose  has  the  advantage, 
and  that  it  requires  a  far  finer  ear  to  do  justice 
to  all  its  rhythmical  glories  than  to  appreciate 
the  rudimentary  qualities  of  metre. 


CHAPTER   II 

ipentametet  3Lfne 

THE  favorite  metre  for  dignified  poetry  is  "* 
that  in  which  each  normal  verse  has  ten  syl- 
lables, alternately  stressed  and  unstressed. 
For  fools  rush  in  where  angels  fear  to  tread. 

In  the  age  of  Queen  Anne  this  kind  of  verse  was 
written  almost  always  in  riming  couplets,  and 
in  that  combination  it  is  still  called  "heroic 
verse."  The  same  metre  was  so  magnificently 
used  without  rime  by  Marlowe,  Shakespeare, 
Milton,  and  many  others  of  our  great  poets, 
that  the  name  "blank  verse"  belongs  to  it  ex- 
clusively, though  there  was  originally  no  obvious 
reason  why  the  name  should  not  cover  rimeless 
lines  of  other  sorts  as  well.  The  Spenserian 
stanza  is  mainly  composed  of  lines  of  the  same 
type,  and  so  are  divers  kinds  of  stanzas  made 
familiar  by  Chaucer,  Shakespeare,  Byron,  and 
others.  This  metre  is  therefore  by  far  the  most 

19 


20  English  Verse 

conspicuous  of  all  ;  and,  as  it  happens,  it  is  also 
the  most  interesting  and  significant  in  its  struc- 
ture. We  will  examine  it  as  it  appears  in  the 
individual  line  before  we  consider  its  combina- 
tions in  couplet  or  stanza  ;  and  for  our  present 
purposes  we  may  take  examples  from  any  sort 
of  poem,  regardless  of  context. 

It  is  first  to  be  noted  that  the  stress  in  verse 
frequently  seems  to  fall  on  syllables  which  are 
hardly  capable  of  bearing  it.  Unemphatic 
words  like  "of"  and  "in,"  and  unemphatic  syl- 
lables of  long  words,  often  count  for  as  much  in 
the  rhythm  of  a  line  as  the  words  of  most  im- 
portance. For  example,  in  our  versified  sentence 
from  Genesis  we  have 


And  God  then  saw  the  wickedness  of  man, 

where  the  last  syllable  of  "wickedness"  seems  to 
take  up  as  much  space  as  the  first  in  the  rhyth- 
mical scheme,  and  to  be  treated  like  any  other 
accented  syllable.  Is  it  accented  at  all?  Many 
readers  will  say  yes;  that  it  bears  a  light 
secondary  accent,  and  hence  is  not  at  all  ex- 
ceptional. For  my  part  I  doubt  whether  I 


The  Pentameter  Line  21 

stress  it  more  than  the  middle  syllable  of  the 
word;  but  I  am  sure  that  whether  I  do  or  not 
makes  little  difference  in  the  rhythm  of  the  line. 
I  pronounce  the  final  syllable  at  the  proper 
time,  allowing  the  proper  interval  before  it  and 
the  proper  interval  after  it.  The  effect  is  as  if 
a  runner  should  put  one  foot  in  a  hole  and  so  fail 
to  touch  ground.  We  can  perhaps  imagine  him 
going  on  without  breaking  step ;  the  rhythm  of 
his  pace  is  maintained,  though  a  single  beat  is 
weakened.  In  all  rhythms,  as  I  insisted  in  the 
first  chapter,  regularity  of  time  is  the  prime 
essential,  and  in  verse  the  stresses  are  merely 
the  pegs  on  which  the  rhythm  of  the  line  is  hung. 
By  taking  out  one  peg  you  will  not  necessarily 
let  the  whole  line  collapse. 

Indeed  there  is  a  sense  in  which  we  may  deny 
that  a  peg  has  been  removed.  I  should  still 
describe  the  line  as  one  of  five  stresses,  for  the 
fourth  stress  is  theoretically  present;  and  it  is 
actually  present  in  that  subliminal  conscious- 
ness in  which  we  carry  our  ideal  scheme,  as  ex- 
plained in  the  first  chapter.  That  ideal  scheme 
is  a  regular  movement  from  stress  to  stress,  but 


22  English  Verse 

the  actual  movement  of  verse  never  coincides 
with  it  very  long.  The  exigencies  of  language 
hardly  permit  it.  It  would  be  possible,  indeed, 
to  write  verse  in  which  every  stress  should  be 
real  and  substantial, — continuous  sequences  of 
lines  like 

For  fools  rush  in  where  angels  fear  to  tread; 

but  such  verse  would  not  be  written  by  an  artist. 
An  individual  line  or  two  may  be  highly  ef- 
fective, but  the  elephantine  tramp,  if  long  con- 
tinued, would  be  as  unpleasant  as  the  childish 
sing-song  recitation  of  Mother  Goose.  Hence 
every  poet  grades  his  stresses  all  the  way  from 
the  heaviest  emphasis  down  to  a  mere  cipher, 
and  (Joes  so  n°t  merely  for  convenience  but  for 
artistic  effect.  In  this  respect,  again,  verse  il- 
lustrates the  law  of  conflict.  The  ideal  scheme 
persists  in  our  minds,  and  the  exigencies  of 
language,  though  perpetually  at  war  with  its 
demands,  are  never  able  to  overthrow  it.  This 
conflict,  like  that  considered  in  the  first  chapter, 
is  one  of  the  sources  of  the  pleasure  that  good 
verse  affords. 


The  Pentameter  Line  23 

Tennyson  and  Fitzgerald  once  amused  them- 
selves by  a  contest  to  determine  which  could 
compose  "the  weakest  Wordsworthian  line  im- 
aginable." Between  them  they  produced  the 

following : 

A  Mr.  Wilkinson,  a  clergyman. 

Wordsworth,  to  be  sure,  is  one  of  the  very 
greatest  of  English  poets ;  but  this  is  a  delicious 
parody  upon  the  banalities  into  which  he  some- 
times lapsed.  Of  course  it  hits  the  prosaic 
quality  of  some  of  Wordsworth's  sentiments; 
but  the  feature  of  the  line  that  specially  con- 
cerns us  is  the  weakness  of  some  of  its  stresses. 
The  rhythm  seems  to  gather  itself  together  by  a 
sort  of  consumptive  effort  on  the  syllables 
"Wilk— "  and  "cler— ",  but  after  each  of 
these  it  trails  off  into  a  breathless  collapse.  , 
The  law  of  conflict  lends  no  support  to  a  line  in 
which  the  ideal  scheme  is  so  completely  put  to1 
rout. 

Of  course  there  are  noble  lines  in  English 
poetry  with  as  many  as  two  weak  stresses. 
When  Young  writes 

Dim  miniature  of  greatness  absolute 


24  English  Verse 

no  one  thinks  of  weakness.  The  difference  be- 
tween this  line  and  the  foregoing  parody  is  not 
so  much  in  the  aggregate  strength  of  the 
stresses  as  in  the  manner  of  distributing  their 
strength  and  placing  the  weaker  ones.  A  clas- 
sification of  the  arrangements  that  are  good  and 
those  that  are  bad  would  be  somewhat  pedantic 
and  not  very  instructive,  and  I  shall  not  attempt 
one.  Moreover,  it  must  be  noted  that  the  weak- 
ness of  the  parody  is  as  much  in  the  sense  as  in 
the  sound.  It  does  sound  deplorably  feeble,  but 
I  am  not  sure  that  noble  words  with  exactly  the 
same  cadence  might  not  sound  fairly  satis- 
factory. The  truth  is  that  we  can  never  wholly 
dissociate  sense  from  sound,  and  that  for  this 
reason  the  "laws  of  verse"  are  unstable  things 
and  must  be  stated  with  extreme  caution,  if  at 
all. 

Just  one  aspect  of  these  weak  stresses  remains 
to  be  noted.  If  you  say,  in  ordinary  prose, 
"That  water  is  the  Atlantic,"  you  may  natu- 
rally lay  a  slight  stress  on  "is" ;  but  if  you  say 
"That  water  is  Chesapeake  Bay,"  the  same 
word  seems  incapable  of  receiving  any  stress 


The  Pentameter  »Line  25 

whatever.  It  is  absolutely  as  important  as  be- 
fore, but  there  is  a  certain  difference  in  its  rel- 
ative importance.  In  the  former  case  it  is  one 
of  four  unemphatic  syllables,  and  your  rhyth- 
mical instinct  is  very  likely  to  pick  it  out  as  a 
convenient  point  to  alight  upon  in  mid-flight. 
In  the  second  sentence,  with  the  substantial 
word  Chesapeake  looming  up  just  beyond,  the 
insignificant  copula  is  overlooked. 

Now  in  verse  a  great  many  stresses  are  to  be 
justified  in  this  same  manner.  Compare,  for 
instance,  two  lines  from  a  speech  of  Satan  in 
Paradise  Lost: 

His  ministers  of  vengeance  and  pursuit 

and 
Perhaps  hath  spent  his  shafts,  and  ceases  now. 

In  the  former,  "and"  is  stressed ;  in  the  latter, 
it  is  equally  important,  but  unstressed.  It  is 
a  common  error  to  regard  the  stress  in  the 
former  case  as  due  to  a  mere  convention  of  verse. 
It  is  not  the  stress  of  rhetorical  emphasis,  to  be 
sure,  nor  that  of  verbal  accent ;  but  it  is  a  per- 
fectly natural  speech-rhythm-stress,  and  is  as 


26  English  Verse 

proper  to  prose  as  to  verse.  It  is  true  that 
stresses  occur  in  verse  which  would  be  omitted 
in  prose.  This  is  because  in  reading  verse  we 
become  accustomed  to  the  regular  recurrence  of 
stresses  on  alternate  syllables,  and  are  therefore 
ready  to  let  our  rhythm  rest  upon  light  particles 
which  in  prose  we  might  pass  over.  I  doubt, 
however,  the  wisdom  of  calling  even  these  stresses 
purely  conventional,  or  treating  them  as  due  to 
versifiers'  license ;  and  at  all  events  those  which 
demand  such  treatment  are  comparatively  very 
rare.  The  reader  may  .  perhaps  gain  some 
further  light  on  this  subject  by  turning  back 
to  the  passage  from  Genesis  in  the  first  chapter, 
and  comparing  the  treatment  there  accorded  to 
the  word  wickedness  with  the  treatment  of  the 
same  word  in  our  metrical  version. 

We  must  now  proceed  to  other  variations 
from  the  normal  scheme.  No  poet  maintains 
for  any  length  of  time  the  regular  alternation 
of  stressed  and  unstressed  syllables.  A  limited 
variety  is  always  sought  and  attained  by  oc- 
casional inversions  of  the  normal  order.  This 


The  Pentameter  Line  27 

inversion  is  commonest  at  the  beginning  of  the 

line,  as  in 

s\  '  v         S  \         /<         {\ 

Tearsi  f  romj  the  depthjof  some'  divine  despair]. 

This  verse  is  like  most  others  in  having  just  five 
stresses  and  just  ten  syllables;  but  two  of  the 
unstressed  syllables  are  together  after  the  first 
stress.  Note,  however,  that  though  the  order  of 
syllables  is  peculiar,  the  rhythmic  intervals  are, 
as  usual,  approximately  equal. 

Less  frequently,  but  still  often,  a  similar  in- 
version is  found  in  the  middle  of  a  verse,  as  in 

A  miriajnot  to  pe  changed  jby  place  or  time. 

This  change  is  less  frequent  because  it  is  more 
violent,  since  it  brings  together  in  the  same  line 
two  stressed  as  well  as  two  unstressed  syllables. 
In  the  line  cited  the  rhythm  is  regular,  as  be- 
fore ;  for  we  instinctively  dwell  on  "mind"  long 
enough,  and  hurry  over  "to  be"  fast  enough,  to 
keep  the  two  intervals  approximately  equal. 
The  irregularity  is  in  the  metre,  not  in  the 
rhythm.  It  will  be  clear,  however,  upon  reflec- 
tion, that  this  variation  is  not  so  easily  manage- 
able in  the  middle  of  a  line  as  at  the  beginning. 


28  English  Verse 

When  a  grammatical  pause  occurs  it  easily  fills 
out  the  rhythm,  as  in  the  third  line  of  this 
passage : 

But  that  the  dread  of  something  after  death, 
The  undiscovered  country  from  wjiose  bourne 

No  traveler  returns, !r>uzzles  the  willJ 
I  (A 

The  inversion  here  is  as  easy  as  one  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  line ;  but  if  there  is  no  such  pause  the 
two  adjacent  words  which  are  to  bear  the 
stresses  must  be  important  and  emphatic. 
Otherwise  the  reader  will  hardly  perceive  the 
poet's  design ;  he  will  fail  to  dwell  on  the  first 
long  enough,  or  will  pass  lightly  over  the  second, 
seeking  a  better  resting-place  farther  on. 

There  are  two  curious  lines  in  King  Lear, 
spoken  by  Kent  near  the  end  of  the 

1  havef  a  journjey,  sir.Lshortiy  to  go;| 
My  muster  cdusjme?  Ivmust  not  say 


One's  impulse  is  to  read  these  in  the  rhythm  of 
"Where  are  you  going  to,  my  pretty  maid," 

thus: 

I'  have  a  journey  sir,  shdrtly  to  go; 
My  master  calls  me,  I  must  not  say  n6. 

But  clearly  Shakespeare  was  writing  pentam- 


The  Pentameter  Line  29 

eter  verses,  and  intended  that  the  word  "sir" 
should  be  stressed  and  followed  by  a  pause,  thus : 

I  have]  a  journey,  sir,-Ushortly  to  go;\ 
My  master  calls!  me,*  I '[must  notlsay  no.\ 

These  lines,  as  pronounced  on  the  stage  by  an 
intelligent  actor,  are  entirely  satisfactory ;  but 
in  a  modern  poem,  addressed  to  readers  rather 
than  auditors,  they  would  seem  very  careless. 

The  reader  may  well  exercise  his  own  judg- 
ment upon  the  two  following  lines,  the  first 
Shelley's  and  the  second  Milton's : 

The  lone' couch  of 'his  ^rlasting  sleep.  » 

Which!  tasted,  works  knowledge  of  good  and  ewl. 

A     p  T  i     I 

To  my  individual  taste  Shelley's  line  is  pecu- 
liarly beautiful,  while  Milton's,  considered  by  it- 
self, is  not  quite  satisfactory  because  its  rhythm 
lacks  inevitableness.  It  will  readily  be  under- 
stood, however,  that  a  line  cannot  fairly  be 
separated  from  its  context.  With  any  true 
lover  of  Milton's  magnificent  rhythms  who  pro- 
tests that  this  is  a  happy  instance  of  Mil- 
ton's skill  in  perpetual  variation,  I  have  no 
quarrel,  though  I  do  not  share  his  opinion. 


30  English  Verse 

Such    inversions     as     these     are     sometimes 
doubled.     Thus  Tennyson  wrote 

But  Arthur,  looking  down1  ward  asuh  :  v   ised.  1 

/<(;/)         [       °  /    |  f  I  I       / 

ft  reltjlnei '  lighb  01  her  eyes  into,  his  life 
A!  Smile  on  the  sudnec ; 

A 
and  a  similar  effect  is  seen  in  the  middle  of  this 

line  from  Milton : 

As  a  despite  done  against  the  Most  High. 

Even   triple  inversions   are  rarely  seen,   as   in 

Shelley's  line 

>l  1  /  I       '       ' 

Harpioniaing  silence  without!  a  sound. 

I  '  I  \ 

But  in  all  such  cases  of  metrical  inversion  it 

must  be  observed  first,  that  the  poet  does  not 
mean  to  abandon  his  rhythm,  and  second,  that 
he  does  not  change  the  total  number  of  syllables. 
This  latter  fact  is  curiously  noteworthy.  If 
poets  write  such  lines  as  have  been  quoted,  why 
not  just  as  well  write 

Tears  from  depths  oi:  some  divine  despair, 

or 
Felt  the  light  of  eyes  into  his  life, 

or 

The  lone  couch  of  everlasting  sleep? 
These  would  possess  the  same  rhythm,  though 


The  Pentameter  Line  31 

they  have  but  nine  syllables  apiece.  Such  lines 
were  in  fact  common  in  Chaucer  and  in  the 
Elizabethan  dramatists,  but  in  poetry  later 
than  the  17th  century  you  must  search  long  be- 
fore you  find  them. 

The  modern  ban  upon  such  lines  is,  I  think, 
purely  a  matter  of  convention.  I  doubt  the  ex- 
istence of  any  sufficient  reason,  apart  from 
convention,  why  such  lines  should  not  satisfy  us. 
In  verse  of  four  stresses  similar  truncations  are 
common,  as  in  II  Penseroso: 

,  Comeiperi|iive  nunj  devout)  and  pure| 

S&berfst/adlfast^and  [demurel 
A  »       4 

In  this  metre  lines  of  seven  and  lines  of  eight 
syllables  are  universally  felt  to  be  congruous. 
Why  then,  except  for  convention,  should  the 
heroic  line  never  be  shortened  to  nine  syllables? 
To  my  own  ear  a  shortened  line  would  be  as 
unpleasing,  I  think,  as  to  anyone's ;  but  this  is 
not  because  it  would  offend  my  natural  rhyth- 
mical instinct.  It  is  because  through  familiar- 
ity with  the  classic  regularity  of  the  masters  my 
ear  has  learned  to  demand  that  the  heroic  line 
shall  have  not  only  five  beats  but  also  its  full 


32  English  Verse 

quota  of  ten  syllables.  My  ear  expects  that  in 
general  the  stressed  and  unstressed  syllables  will 
alternate;  and  when  this  alternation  is  agreea- 
bly interrupted  by  the  omission  of  an  unstressed 
syllable,  my  ear  demands  that  the  omission  be 
atoned  for  by  a  doubling  of  syllables  later  in 
the  line.  There  are  historical  reasons  for  this 
convention, — reasons  traceable  to  the  influence 
of  French  and  Latin  verse-forms;  but  these  do 
not  concern  us  here. 

While  the  number  of  syllables  may  not  be 
reduced,  it  is  frequently  augmented.  An  elev- 
enth syllable  is  often  added,  making  a  "feminine 

ending,"  as  in 

>     ,         '  ,          /  '  \        /  ,  j 

Farewell,  I  a  long |  farewell,!  to  all  !my  greatness; 

and  doubled  light  syllables  in  the  interior  of  the 
verse  are  very  common,  as  in 

Dim  miniature  of  greatness  absolute; 
The  multitudinous  seas  incarnadine; 

\      j  /  S  t 

O  Lancelot,  if  thou  love  me  get  thee  hence; 
Of  man's  first  dis'obe&ience  and  the  fruit; 
To  set  himself  in  glory  above  his  peers. 

Milton,  whose  taste  was  largely  influenced  by 
classical  and  Italian  poets,  seems  to  have  re- 


The  Pentameter  Line  33 

garded  most  of  his  blank  verse  as  rigidly  deca- 
syllabic. In  Paradise  Lost,  especially,  all  lines 
which  have  supernumerary  syllables  were  prob- 
ably normalized  in  the  poet's  own  consciousness 
by  elision,  or  syncope,  or  some  similar  process. 
For  example,  Milton's  understanding  of  the  last 
line  above  cited  was  pretty  certainly  something 
like  this : 

To  set  himself  in  glor  yabove  his  peers. 

There  are  no  lines  in  Paradise  Lost  which  can- 
not be  reduced  to  the  normal  by  some  such  de- 
vice; but  to  our  unsophisticated  ears  the  proc- 
ess is  often  over-violent,  and  I  myself  do  not 
try  to  read  Milton  as  I  think  he  intended.  Most 
poets  frankly  admit  extra  syllables  in  their 
verse,  and  most  readers  are  content  to  find  such 
syllables  even  in  Milton. 

These  extra  syllables,  however,  are  generally 
of  the  sort  that  may  be  very  lightly  pronounced. 
None  of  the  lines  above  quoted  seem  exceptional, 
because  the  change  in  the  metre  does  not  affect 
the  rhythmic  interval.  When  unstressed  syl- 
lables of  more  substantial  weight  are  doubled, 


34  English  Verse 

the  effect  is  more  striking ;  and  the  frequent  use 
even  of  very  light  doublings  will  attract  atten- 
tion.    Thus  when  Mr.  Moody  writes 
»  i  ,  '•         i 

Whispered  us  Nature's  secrets,  given  to  our  hand, 

or  when  Tennyson  writes 

O  Galahad,  and  O  Galahad,  follow  me, 

and  even 
L   CamelopBr  city  of  shadowy  palaces, 

we  cannot  ignore  the  metrical  variation.  Such 
peculiarities  are  a  distinctive  feature  of  Tenny- 
son's style.  He  has  shown  extraordinary  skill 
in  manipulating  them,  and  to  my  ear  his  best 
blank  verse  gives  unalloyed  pleasure ;  but  I  think 
he  has  carried  this  liberty  to  the  limit  of  safety. 
Some  of  his  imitators,  like  Mr.  Stephen  Phillips, 
have  carried  it  even  beyond  that  point.  The 
pleasure  which  verse  gives  is  due  largely  to  the 
conflict  between  the  poet's  thought  and  the  ideal 
regularity  of  the  scheme;  we  like  to  see  the 
thought  cramped  within  artificial  bounds,  and 
only  occasionally  asserting  its  independence ; 
and  poets  who  are  too  forgetful  of  the  scheme 
deprive  us  of  the  pleasure  of  the  conflict.  They 


The  Pentameter  Line  35 

sacrifice  too  much  for  the  appearance  of  spon- 
taneity, not  realizing  that  art  must  and  should 
be  largely  artifice. 

There  remains  but  one  common  kind  of  varia- 
tion to  be  considered,  but  it  is  somewhat  more 
difficult  of  analysis  than  any  others.  The  fol- 
lowing lines  illustrate  it  in  various  forms. 

/         /  / 

(1)  Then  tote  with  bloody  talon  the  rent  plain.  (Byron.) 

(2)  Disa^ei-s  in  Ue  siln,  and  the  moist  star.     (Hamlet.) 

i       /         /  >  / 

(3)  In  hef^Tsaiid  lights  the  starry  spirits  dance.     (Shel- 

1--)      / 

(4)  That  I  rcav  sit  and  p  dur  out  my  sad  sprite.     (Fletch- 

er.) 

In  the  first  specimen  many  readers  will  feel  that 
we  have  merely  an  example  of  weak  stress,  like 
those  already  noted ;  that  while  the  word  "the" 
is  wholly  unemphatic,  and  is  actually  less 
strongly  stressed  than  "rent,"  yet  it  occupies 
the  place  of  the  fourth  stress  in  the  ideal  scheme ; 
and  that  the  fourth  and  fifth  rhythmic  intervals 
fall  respectively  between  "tal — "  and  "the"  and 
between  "the"  and  "plain."  We  may  indicate 
this  reading  graphically  by  a  grave  accent: 

Then  tore  with  bloody  talon  the  rent  plain. 


36  English  Verse 

The  effect  is  like  that  sometimes  produced  by  the 
falling  of  a  logical  emphasis  upon  a  rhythmi- 

r 

cally  unstressed  word,  as  in  Shakespeare's  line: 

That  I'  did  love,  for  n6w  my  love  is  thawed. 
You  may  emphasize  "did"  as  vehemently  as 
all  the  rest  of  the  line  put  together,  yet  you 
have  no  difficulty  in  recognizing  that  "I," 
"love,"  and  "now"  are  the  real  bearers  of  the 
rhythm.  So  in  Byron's  line,  the  unimportance 
of  "the"  as  compared  with  "rent"  is  immaterial ; 
it  may  not  receive  any  stress,  but  it  comes  at  the 
stress-time. 

But  there  is  another  way  of  reading  the  line. 
Many  persons  put  the  fourth  stress  on  "rent" ; 
and  they  leave  between  "tal — "  and  "rent"  and 
between  "rent"  and  "plain"  approximately 
equal  intervals ;  or  at  least  they  feel  the  inter- 
vals to  be  approximately  equal.  According  to 
this  interpretation,  the  line  is  like  the  specimens 
of  inversion  already  considered,  but  with  this 
difference:  here  the  stress  is  postponed  instead 
of  anticipated;  and  the  two  metrical  stresses 
that  come  together  are  preceded,  not  followed, 
by  the  two  unstressed  syllables. 


The  Pentameter  Line  37 

Either  of  these  two  ways  of  reading  Byron's 
line  is  proper  enough,  but  I  am  inclined  to  pre- 
fer still  a  third  method, — a  kind  of  compromise 
between  them.  I  myself  read  it,  I  think,  with 
what  the  metrists  call  a  "hovering  accent." 
That  is,  I  let  the  imaginary  beat  of  the  fourth 
stress  fall  somewhere  between  the  word  "the" 
and  the  word  "rent ;"  but  I  cannot  say  exactly 
where.  I  am  not  sure  that  either  word  comes 
exactly  at  the  stress-time;  but  between  "talon" 
and  "plain"  there  are  certainly  two  rhythmic 
intervals,  and  the  intermediate  stress  seems 
somehow  to  be  taken  care  of  by  the  words  "the 
rent"  jointly. 

It  may  be  questioned  which  way  of  reading 
Byron's  line  is  best,  and  I  am  unable  to  say 
which  was  Byron's  own  way.  But  either  way 
is  in  accordance  with  the  principles  of  verse, 
and  readers  of  poetry  will  find  lines  in  which 
now  one  way  and  now  another  seems  obligatory. 
In  the  line  from  Hamlet  (the  second  in  my  list) 
I  should  probably  let  "moist"  almost  monopolize 
the  fourth  stress.  In  the  third  specimen,  I  feel 
less  certain  as  to  the  share  in  the  first  stress  that 


38  English  Verse 

I  would  give  to  "mild" ;  and  some  persons  may 
even  put  the  stress  on  the  first  word  in  the  line. 
In  the  fourth  specimen  I  would  not  put  the  whole 
fourth  stress  on  "sad,"  though  some  metrists  do 
so ;  and  I  am  not  sure  that  I  would  put  any  of 
it  there.  This  last  line  is  a  very  pleasing  one, 
and  a  striking  example  of  the  law  of  conflict. 

I  transcribe  a  few  lines  from  Shelley's  Alas- 
tor,  as  illustrative  of  all  the  principles  discussed 
in  this  chapter.  I  shall  add  no  specific  explana- 
tions. The  reader,  however,  cannot  fail  to  see 
that  the  passage  is  a  beautiful  exemplification 
of  the  general  law,  and  that  all  its  variations  of 
metre,  though  sometimes  puzzling,  are  yet 
clearly  reducible  to  some  one  or  another  of  the 
types  already  explained. 

Mother  of  this  unfathomable  world ! 
FaVour  my  solemn  song,  for  I  have  loved 
Thee  ever,  and  thee  only;  I  have  watched 
Thy  shadow,  and  the  darkness  of  thy  st&ps, 
And  my  heart  ever  gazes  on  the  depth 
Of  thy  deep  mysteries,    t  hove  marie  my  bed 
In  charnels  and  on  coffins,  where  black  (leath 
Keeps  record  of  the  trophies  won  from  thee, 
Hoping  tc  still  these  obstinate  questionings 


The  Pentameter  Line  39 

Of  thee  and  thine,  by  forcing  some  lone  ghost, 
Thy  messenger,  to  render  up  the  tale 
Of  what  we  are. 


In  the  foregoing  paragraphs  I  have  avoided 
all  mention  of  the  word  foot.  It  would  often 
have  been  more  convenient  to  use  it,  and  I  have 
been  put  to  some  circumlocution  to  escape  from 
it ;  but  I  wished,  even  at  the  risk  of  awkward- 
ness, to  make  it  clear  that  verse  can  be  under- 
stood and  appreciated  by  one  who  knows  noth- 
ing of  foot-structure  or  scansion.  Feet  are  not 
organic  elements  of  rhythm.  Analysis  of  verse 
by  feet  is  like  analysis  of  pictures  by  square 
inches ;  it  may  be  very  convenient  to  point  out  a 
certain  figure  as  being  three  inches  from  the  top 
and  two  inches  from  the  right-hand  side  of  a 
painting,  or  to  say  that  the  third  or  fourth 
foot  of  a  verse  is  inverted  or  defective;  but  in 
neither  case  is  such  an  index-method  anything 
more  than  a  labor-saving  convenience. 

The  convenience,  however,  of  description  by 
feet  is  so  great  that  it  is  idle  to  object  to  it  on 
theoretical  grounds.  Even  the  fact  that  our 
names  of  feet  are  borrowed  from  the  ancients, 


40  English  Verse 

and  that  the  rhythm  of  their  verse  was  measured 
by  the  length  of  syllables  instead  of  the  inter- 
vals between  accents,  does  not  forbid  us  to  use 
those  names  in  description  of  our  own  verse; 
for  they  have  become  so  fixed  by  long  misuse  in 
our  vocabulary  that  the  misuse  has  acquired 
a  prescriptive  right  to  recognition ;  and  nobody 
has  devised  a  better  system.  I  therefore  feel  at 
liberty  to  use  the  old  names  freely ;  and  in  rein- 
troducing  them  here  I  shall  merely  introduce  an 
occasional  caveat  against  misunderstandings. 

The  feet  most  commonly  named  by  our  me- 
trists  are  the  iambus,  trochee,  spondee,  pyrrhic, 
dactyl,  and  anapaest.  In  the  Greek  and  Latin 
metrics  an  iambus  consisted  of  a  short  and  a 
long  syllable  (^  -)  and  a  trochee  was  an  inverted 
iambus  (- ^).  In  reference  to  English  verse  we 
mean  by  an  iambus  a  foot  of  two  syllables  of 
which  the  second  is  stressed,  while  in  a  trochee 
the  first  is  stressed.  The  length  of  the  syllables 
is  disregarded.  Thus  under  the  classical  system 
such  a  word  as  pittance  might  be  called  an 
iambus  (if  I  am  right  in  thinking  the  first  syl- 
lable distinctly  short  and  the  second  long), 


The  Pentameter  Line  41 

while  under  our  system  it  is  certainly  a  trochee, 
for  the  first  syllable  is  accented  and  the  second 
is  not.  Hereafter  we  need  not  concern  ourselves 
with  the  classical  conception ;  and  we  may  as 
well  even  use  the  convenient  symbols  —  and  ^  for 
stressed  and  unstressed  syllables  respectively. 
With  this  understanding,  we  may  define  all  the 
feet  above  enumerated  by  the  following  symbols. 

Iambus 

Trochee      —  ^ 

Spondee 

Pyrrhic      ^  ^ 

Dactyl        _ww 

Anapsest     ^  w  _ 

The  typical  iambic  line  consists  of  five  iambi ; 
but  several  other  feet  are  sometimes  admitted, 
by  substitution.     Thus  such  a  line  as  Shelley's 
The  lone  couch  of  his  everlasting  sleep 

is  described  by  most  metrists  as  having  a  trochee 
in  the  second  place,  and  is  scanned  as  follows : 
The  16ne /couch  of /his  ev/arlast /ing  slee*p. 

I  see  no  good  reason  why  it  should  not  equally 
well  be  divided  in  this  way  : 


42  English  Verse 

The  16ne/couch/of  his  ev/erlast/ing  sleep, 

with  an  anapaest  in  the  third  place  and  a  mono- 
syllabic foot  in  the  second.  This  indeed  comes 
nearer  than  the  other  division  to  actual  descrip- 
tion of  the  line's  rhythm ;  but  as  neither  method 
is  exact  or  scientifically  truthful,  and  as  many 
metrists  prefer  to  deny  the  existence  of  mono- 
syllabic feet,  we  may  as  well  accept  the  former 
scansion.  In  doing  so,  however,  jve  are  well 
aware  that  the  so-called  feet  "couch  of"  and 
" — erlast"  are  not  rhythmical  entities  at  all. 
They  are  not  real  units  of  the  organism,  they 
are  merely  sections  cut  off  by  artificial  lines  of 
cleavage,  and  they  exist  only  for  convenience  of 
description. 

Metrists  usually  say  that  the  pyrrhic  is  some- 
times admitted  in  iambic  verse;  and  some  lead- 
ing authorities  point  out  that  it  generally  is 
found  with  a  spondee  immediately  after  it. 
Such  is  the  description  of  Byron's  line 

•'  s  /    '    V         V  '  /         \ 

Then  tore  with  blooqy  talon  the  rent  plain. 

\ 

The  pyrrhic  is  " — on  the"  and  the  spondee  is 
"rent  plain."  As  we  saw  a  few  pages  back, 


The  Pentameter  Line  43 

there  are  two  or  three  ways  of  reading  this  line, 
and  either  way  is  fairly  indicated  by  this  scan- 
sion; but  of  course  it  is  far  from  exact.  Feet 
are  arbitrary  and  phantom  concepts,  and  this 
description  of  the  line  does  not  touch  the  really 
vital  fact  about  its  rhythm, — the  underlying 
regularity  of  its  time-scheme.  Moreover,  if  we 
choose  to  read  it  with  the  fourth  stress  on 
"rent,"  and  a  rhythmic  interval  between  "rent" 
and  "plain,"  it  seems  illogical  to  describe  "rent 
plain"  as  a  single  foot  at  all.  The  two  words 
belong  to  different  rhythmic  units,  and  it  would 
be  less  untrue  to  say  that  " — on  the  rent"  is  an 
anapsest  and  "plain"  a  monosyllabic  foot.  In- 
deed a  spondee  (if  the  term  denotes  a  foot  of 
two  stressed  syllables)  is,  from  our  point  of 
view,  an  impossibility  in  English  verse ;  for  com- 
mon sense  seems  to  demand  a  separate  foot  for 
each  rhythmic  interval,  and  consequently  for 
each  stress.  This  objection  has  been  strongly 
urged  by  many  metrists,  and  there  is  much  dis- 
pute about  the  scansion  of  the  line  quoted.  It 
seems  to  me,  however,  that  all  such  disputes  are 
teapot  'tempests.  Since  feet  are  merely  mat- 


44  English  Verse 

ters  of  convenience,  and  rival  systems  of  scan- 
sion merely  different  devices  for  attaining 
convenience  at  the  expense  of  scientific  ac- 
curacy, it  seems  useless  to  spin  theories  about 
them.  I  am  in  the  habit  of  speaking  of  pyr- 
rhics,  anapaests,  trochees,  and  what  not,  when- 
ever it  becomes  convenient  to  do  so;  and  if  my 
use  of  such  terms  ever  appears  unsystematic,  I 
frankly  confess  that  it  really  is  so,  and  that  I  do 
not  greatly  care  to  avoid  such  an  appearance. 


CHAPTER  III 

ffilanfc  Werse 

I  HAVE  remarked  that  the  decasyllabic  line  is 
the  favorite  in  English  poetry.  The  reasons 
for  its  preeminence  are  best  seen  not  in  single 
lines  but  in  continuous  passages. 

One  great  advantage  of  this  metre  is  its  un- 
symmetrical  character.  A  line  of  five  stresses 
cannot  be  divided  into  two  like  parts.  Lines  of 
four  stresses  often  fall  naturally  into  sym- 
metrical halves,  as  in  this  passage  from  Byron : 

Yes,  love  indeed  is  light  from  heaven, 

A  spark  of  that  immortal  fire 
With  angels  shared,  by  Allah  given, 

To  lift  from  earth  our  low  desire. 

This  equal  division  is  not  necessary,  to  be  sure, 
but  it  must  be  of  frequent  occurrence;  and 
though  such  verses  as  those  quoted  may  be  very 
beautiful  in  themselves,  long  poems  require  more 
variety  than  is  possible  in  this  metre.  The  in- 
evitable tendency  to  sing-song  is  hostile  to  both 
dignity  and  subtlety.  Of  six-stress  verse  the 

45 


46  English  Verse 

same  may  be  said,  with  even  more  emphasis. 
Here  is  a  passage  from  Drayton: — one  is  con- 
scious of  a  slight  rhythmical  break  not  only  at 
the  end  but  also  in  the  middle  of  each  line. 

The  Naiads  and  the  Nymphs  extremely  overjoyed, 
And  on  the  winding  banks  all  busily  employed, 
Upon  this  joyful  day,  some  dainty  chap  lets  twine; 
Some  others  chosen  out,  with  fingers  neat  and  fine 
Brave  anadems  do  make. 

It  is  evident  that  the  five-stress  verse  is  not 
merely  capable  of  greater  variety  than  these 
forms,  but  that  it  is  quite  incapable  of  this 
particular  sing-song  monotony.  Nevertheless, 
a  bad  poet  could  produce  equally  unpleasing 
effects  with  it.  Consider,  for  example,  these 
three  lines : 

The  so  j  owners  of  Goshen  who  beheld  \ 
His  ministers  of  vengeance  and  \pursuit  \ 
Transfix  us  t&  the  bottom  6f  this  gulf. 

This  is  almost  exactly  the  sing-song  of  such 
comic  verse  as  this  of  Gilbert's  (which  I  venture 
to  quote  from  memory)  : 

When  the  enterprising  burglar  isn't  burgling, 
When  the  cut-throat  isn't  occupied  in  crime, 

Then  he  loves  to  hear  the  little  brook  a-gurgling 
And  to  listen  to  the  merry  village  chime. 


Blank  Verse  47 

The  three  lines  quoted  are  in  fact  all  from 
Paradise  Lost,  and  are  singly  unexceptionable. 
Of  course  they  are  not  consecutive ;  Milton's  ear 
would  have  tolerated  no  such  enormity;  but  I 
have  wickedly 'set  them  together  to  illustrate, 
in  an  extreme  way,  the  danger  of  monotony  in 
blank  verse.  The  avoidance  of  such  dangers 
is  of  course  an  elementary  matter ;  but  the  illus- 
tration will  also  suggest,  in  a  negative  way,  the 
manner  in  which  variety  affords  charm  to  blank 
verse.  Any  of  the  passages  to  be  hereafter  cited 
for  other  purposes  may  serve  for  an  example. 

The  reader  will  feel  that  good  verse  always 
makes  its  appeal  to  his  ear  partly  by  this  vari- 
ety ;  but  occasionally,  even  in  Paradise  Lost,  one 
may  find  passages  that  are  conspicuously  lack- 
ing in  this  respect.  One  such  is  in  the  introduc- 
tory invocation. 

\  s,  What  in  me  is  dark 

Illumine  ;)what  is  low,  raise  and  support; 
That,  to  the  highth  of  this  great  argument, 
I  may!  assertl  eternal  Providence, ! 
And  justify  the  ways  of  God  to  men. 

The  lines  ending  in  "argument"  and  "Provi- 
dence" are  strikingly  alike,  even  to  the  weak 


48  English  Verse 

final  cadences;  and  in  this  close  of  a  glorious 
exordium  I  have  always  felt  an  unfortunate 
flatness.  But  in  no  great  poet  will  you  find 
such  things  on  every  page,  and  in  Milton  you 
must  look  far  for  them. 

A  still  more  important  way  of  giving  variety, 
and  hence  charm,  to  blank  verse,  is  by  "varying 
the  pauses."  As  we  saw  in  the  first  chapter,  a 
grammatical  or  rhetorical  pause  marks  the  end, 
in  prose,  of  a  rhythmical  period.  It  has  the 
same  effect  in  verse.  At  the  pause  comes  the  end 
of  one  sequence  of  equal  intervals  of  time  (or 
approximately  equal  intervals)  and  the  begin- 
ning of  another.  The  pause  may  be  long  or 
short,  according  to  the  sense  of  the  context  or 
the  caprice  of  the  reader ;  but  it  is  there,  actu- 
ally or  potentially,  and  its  effect  is  manifest. 
Now  these  pauses  may  occur  anywhere  in  a 

line  of  blank  verse :  thus,  at  the  end,  as  in 

\    J    „•      ,  •       v       •  «      » 

Better  to  reign  in  hell  than  serve  in  heaven; 

or  near  the  middle,  as  in 

To  be  or  not  to  be,  that  is  the  question; 

or  close  to  either  beginning  or  end,  as  in  this 
passage : 


Blank  Verse  49 

Add  the  humble  shrub, 
And  bush  with  frizzled  hair  implicit;  last 
Rose,  as  in  dance,  the  stately  trees. 

But  in  all  the  best  blank  verse,  the  successive 
rhythmical  periods  are  generally  so  ordered 
that  they  occupy  different  parts  of  the  lines. 
A  familiar  example  from  Milton  will  serve  ;  and 
I  choose  a  specimen  of  his  verse  at  its  best. 


the  regionijthis  the  soil,  the  clime,  — 
Said  then  the  lost  archangel,/-this  the  seat 
That  we  must  change  for  heaven  ?/this  mournful  gloom 
For  that  celestial  light  Ijj    Be  it  so/since  he 
Who  now  is  sovran  can  dispose  and  bid 
What  shall  be  right^  farthest  from  him  is  best,^ 
Whom  reason  hath  equaled^  force  hath  made  supreme 
Above  his  equalsy  Farewell,  happy  fields, 
Where  joy  forever  dwells!/  Hail,  horrors,  hail,/ 
Infernal  world  Jyiand  thou/jprofoundest  hell, 
Receive  thy  new  possessor^—  one  who  brings 
A  mind  hot  to  be  changed  by  place  or  time. 

The  best  way  to  appraise  the  peculiar  merit 
of  this  kind  of  verse  is  to  compare  it  with  some 
that  is  inferior  ;  and  I  choose  for  the  purpose  a 
passage  from  Surrey's  Aeneid,  the  earliest 
blank  verse  in  our  literature. 

With  this  the  sky  gan  whirl  about  the  sphere; 
The  cloudy  night  gan  thicken  from  the  sea, 
With  mantles  spread  that  cloked  earth  and  skies, 


50  English  Verse 

And  eke j  the  treajpon  of  |:he  Greekish  guile.  \ 
The  watchmen  lay  dispersed,  to  take  their  rest, 
Whose  wearied  limbs  sound  sleep  had  then  oppressed, 
When  well  in  order  comes  the  Grecian  fleet 
From  Tenedon  towards  the  coasts  well  known, 
By  friendly  silence  of  the  quiet  moon. 

In  Surrey's  verse  almost  every  line  is  a  rhyth- 
mical period  in  itself,  while  in  Milton's  there  is  a 
perpetual  variety.  The  first  rhythmical  period 
(as  I  read  the  Milton  passage)  consists  perhaps 
of  the  first  five  syllables  of  the  first  line;  the 
second,  of  the  rest  of  the  line ;  the  third,  of  seven 
syllables  of  the  second  line ;  the  fourth,  of  the 
rest  of  that  line  and  six  syllables  of  the  third ; 
and  so  on.  We  find  no  two  periods  alike  until 
we  reach  the  seventh  line,  where  "Whom  reason 
hath  equaled"  seems  fairly  to  reproduce  the 
rhythm  of  "Is  this  the  region." 

Now  of  course  it  is  a  very  simple  matter  to 
write  verse  with  pauses  variously  placed.  Any 
intelligent  reader  of  Milton's  verse  can  see  that 
its  beauty  depends  not  solely  on  the  variety, 
but  on  the  kind  of  variety,  in  its  rhythmical 
periods.  We  can  hardly  hope  (nor  indeed  will 
many  of  us  care)  to  subject  the  whole  art  of 


Blank  Verse  51 

verse  to  a  thumb-rule  analysis,  but  some  of  the 
essential  features  of  this  variety  are  susceptible 
of  easy  exposition. 

In  the  first  place,  while  the  pauses  must  be  / ) 
variously  placed,  the  placing  must  not  be  too 
varied.  The  reader  must  never  be  allowed  to 
forget  that  he  is  reading  five-stress  verse.  As 
we  saw  in  the  first  chapter,  one  of  the  essential 
differences  between  blank  verse  and  prose  is  that 
the  former  is  divided  into  lines ;  and  each  line 
is  a  series  of  five  rhythmical  units.  Now  unless 
there  is  some  real  value  in  this  division  the  verse 
might  just  as  well  be  printed  as  prose.  Of 
course  the  division  is  of  value.  It  is  an  essential  ) 
feature  of  the  ideal  scheme  into  which  the  poet's  ; 
thought  is  to  be  compressed,  and  with  which 
the  thought  is  in  perpetual  conflict. 

Now  Surrey  understood  perfectly  well  that 
the  division  was  valuable,  but  he  had  no  concep- 
tion of  the  other  and  larger  possibilities  of  his 
verse.  Every  good  modern  poet  allows  his 
rhythmical  periods  sometimes  to  coincide  with 
his  lines  and  sometimes  to  interfere  with  them. 
He  wants  his  readers  to  be  vaguely  conscious 


52  English  Verse 

of  the  perpetual  conflict  between  the  two ; — as  if 
his  thought,  which  naturally  falls  into  rhyth- 
mical periods,  whether  expressed  in  prose  or  in 
verse,  were  always  refusing  to  be  wholly  sub- 
jected to  the  metrical  scheme,  but  could  never 
escape  from  it  very  far. 

The  most  obvious  way  of  suggesting  the  real 
subjection  of  the  thought  to  the  scheme,  despite 
its  frequent  breaking  away,  is  by  inserting  lines 
just  often  enough  with  pauses  at  the  ends.  In 
the  passage  above  quoted  from  Milton  it  will 
be  seen  that  this  is  done  oftener  toward  the  end 
than  in  the  first  half.  In  the  first  half  a 
reader  may  well  feel  that  the  poet  is  straying 
rather  far  from  the  pentameter  standard;  but 
at  the  close  of  the  quotation  he  certainly  comes 
back  to  it  with  sonorous  emphasis. 

Milton's  general  practice  in  this  matter  can 
be  fairly  shown  by  figures.  I  have  counted  the 
pauses  in  300  consecutive  lines  of  Paradise  Lost, 
and  find  that  rhythmical  periods  end 

at  the  ends  of  lines  161  times; 

\ 

within  the  lines  223  times. 


Blank  Verse  53 

On  the  other  hand,  in  the  same  300  lines  it  is 
worth  noting  that  full  stops, — that  is,  the  ends 
of  the  larger  and  more  independent  periods, 
which  we  may  as  well  distinguish  as  rhythmical 
paragraphs, — occur 

at  the  ends  of  lines  37  times ; 

within  the  lines        .  15  times. 

Such  statistics  as  these  are  of  course  unavail- 
able for  exact  comparisons,  for  the  estimates  are 
largely  subjective.  Who  may  say  precisely  how 
many  periods  are  found  in  a  given  passage? 
But  these  figures  are  suggestive  at  least  to  this 
extent:  they  show  that  while  Milton  varied  his 
periods  most  freely,  and  while  he  placed  his 
pauses  much  oftener  within  his  lines  than  at  the 
ends,  yet  he  had  a  decided  inclination  to  end  his 
periods  with  his  lines  when  their  final  pauses 
were  important  and  emphatic.  His  periods 
generally  conflict  with  his  line-structure,  but 
his  paragraphs  are  more  apt  to  come  out  even 
with  it. 

There  is  another  way  in  which  the  variation 
of  pauses  must  be  carefully  regulated.     To  il- 


54  English  Verse 

lustrate  this  I  have  laid  impious  hands  upon  our 
passage  from  Milton,  and  altered  it  as  follows: 

Is  this  the  soil,  the  clime, — said  then  the  lost 
Archangel, — this  the  region  that  we  must 
Exchange  for  heaven?  this  mournful  gloom  for  that 
Celestial  light?     Be  it  so,  since  he  who  now 
Is  sovran  can  dispose  and  bid  what  shall 
Be  right:  farthest  from  him  is  best,  for  him 
Hath  force  above  his  equals  made  supreme. 
Farewell,  ye  happy  fields  of  heaven,  where  joy 
Forever  dwells!     Hail,  horrors,  hail,  and  thou 
Infernal  world, — profoundest  hell, — receive 
Thy  new  possessor, — one  who  brings  a  mind 
Not  to  be  changed  by  changing  place  or  time. 

Here,  to  be  sure,  I  have  departed  somewhat  too 
freely  from  the  ideal  scheme;  but  I  have  not 
gone  enough  farther,  in  this  respect,  to  account 
for  the  difference  in  effect.  I  have  turned  the 
very  noblest  blank  verse  into  something  little 
better  than  doggerel,  and  that  with  hardly  a 
word  altered.  Most  of  the  rhythmical  periods 
remain  substantially  the  same,  and  they  still 
partly  agree  and  partly  conflict  with  the  lines. 
Each  single  line  in  the  new  version  is  perfectly 
correct  and  artistically  passable,  to  say  the 
least.  What,  then,  is  the  matter? 

The  whole  trouble  is  with  what  we  may  con- 


Blank  Verse  55 

veniently  call  the  "phrasing";  and  the  subject 
of  phrasing  needs  explanation  in  some  detail. 
It  was  obviously  unwise  to  break  the  phrase 
"the  lost  archangel"  between  two  lines.  Rhyth- 
mical periods  are  frequently  so  broken,  and  well 
broken,  as  we  have  seen ;  but  within  the  limits  of 
these  periods  there  are  what  I  shall  call  rhyth- 
mical phrases,  consisting  of  words  so  intimately 
associated  that  they  cannot  be  divorced.  When 
they  are  so  divorced,  it  seems  as  if  the  conflict 
had  virtually  ceased,  and  the  very  existence  of 
the  line-structure  been  forgotten  by  the  poet. 
The  end  of  the  line,  even  when  the  rhythm  and 
sense  of  the  words  run  past  it,  is  after  all  a 
point  of  importance;  we  are,  or  ought  to  be, 
conscious  that  it  is  a  resting-place  for  the 
rhythm  even  when  the  rhythm  does  not  actually 
rest  there ;  and  in  consequence,  when  a  word  that 
concludes  neither  a  rhythmical  period  nor  even 
a  rhythmical  phrase  is  placed  at  the  verse- 
end,  it  receives  a  somewhat  grotesquely  undue 
prominence. 

In  good  verse,  on  the  other  hand,  the  phras- 
ing,— that  is,  the  arrangement  of  the  rhyth- 


56  English  Verse 

mical  phrases  with  reference  to  the  line-struc- 
ture,— acts  as  a  sort  of  treasonous  ally  to  the 
latter  in  its  conflict  with  the  rhythmical  periods  ; 
for  while  the  periods  perpetually  struggle  to 
free  themselves  from  the  bondage  of  the  line- 
structure,  the  phrases,  which  are  the  members 
and  sinews  of  the  periods,  submit  to  that  bond- 
age almost  unreservedly.  The  trouble  with 
my  perversion  of  Satan's  speech  is,  then,  that 
wiiile  my  periodic  structure  and  my  line-struc- 
ture are  reasonably  comparable  with  the  orig- 
inal, I  have  throughout  wrought  havoc  with  the 
rhythmical  phrases,  splitting  them  between  lines 
without  care  or  art.  By  this  means  I  have 
fairly  delivered  the  line-structure  into  the  hands 
of  the  enemy,  and  so  put  an  end  to  the  conflict. 

It  is  often  by  the  phrasing  of  different  poets 
that  their  styles  are  most  easily  discriminated. 
As  an  extreme  instance  (and,  be  it  said  in  ad- 
vance, an  unfair  one)  I  quote  from  Byron's 
Cain. 

My  sister  Zillah  sings  an  earlier  hymn 
Than  the  birds'  matins;  and  my  Adah — my 
Own  and  beloved — she,  too,  understands  not 
The  mind  that  overwhelms  me?  never  till 


Blank  Verse  57 

Now  met  I  aught  to  sympathize  with  me. 

****** 

Was  not  he,  their  father, 

Born  of  the  same  sole  womb,  in  the  same  hour 
With  me?    did  we  not  love  each  other?  and 
In  multiplying  our  being  multiply 
Things  that  will  love  each  other  as  we  love 
Them? 

This  is  assuredly  very  feeble  blank  verse ;  and  it 
is  clear  that  the  feebleness  is  chiefly  due  to  the 
very  bad  phrasing.  A  slight  rearrangement 
makes  it  vastly  more  pleasing. 

My  sister  Zillah  sings  an  earlier  hymn 
Than  the  birds'  matins;  and  my  own  beloved, 
My  Adah,  she  too  understands  not  half 
The  mind  that  overwhelms  me:  ne'er  till  now 
Met  I  a  soul  to  sympathize  with  me. 

****** 

Was  not  he,  their   father, 

Born  of  the  same  sole  womb  with  me,  and  born 
In  the  same  hour?    Did  we  not  love  each  other, 
And  multiplying  our  being  multiply 
Things  that  will  love  each  other  and  love  us 
As  we  love  them? 

The  quotation  is  unfair  to  Byron  because  it 
is  from  one  of  his  dramas,  and  his  dramas  were 
composed  upon  a  false  theory  of  verse.  Byron 
evidently  meant  to  copy  his  system  of  phrasing 
from  some  of  the  old  dramatists,  especially  from 


58  English  Verse 

the  later  plays  of  Shakespeare.  Now  Shake- 
speare wrote  not  for  the  eye  but  for  the  ear ;  and 
in  his  latest  plays  he  let  his  line-structure  sink 
more  and  more  into  obscurity.  He  sometimes 
gave  his  dialogues  the  air  of  half -metrical  prose, 
rather  than  of  verse, — apparently  feeling  that 
verse,  as  a  medium  of  stage  expression,  was  too 
artificial  to  hold  the  mirror  up  to  nature.  He 
did  not  often  write  bad  verse,  as  Byron  did; 
indeed,  the  verse  of  his  latest  plays  is  sometimes 
of  his  very  best;  but  he  set  Byron  a  very  bad 
example.  The  latter  went  much  farther  than 
Shakespeare  had  gone,  doubtless  feeling  that  he 
thereby  secured  freedom  and  spontaneity.  In 
his  non-dramatic  verse  he  never  wrote  so  badly ; 
but  while  the  passages  quoted  above  are  there- 
fore not  fairly  representative,  they  are  passages 
which  could  not  have  been  written  by  a  true 
artist. 

For  an  example  of  a  very  different  kind  of 
verse  I  quote  from  Coleridge's  Nightingale. 

But  never  elsewhere  in  one  place  I  knew 
So  many  nightingales;  and  far  and  near,' 
In  wood  and  thicket,  over  the  wide  grove. 


Blank  Verse  59 

They  answer  and  provoke  each  other's  songs, 

With  skirmish  and  capricious  passagings, 

And  murmurs  musical  and  swift  jug  jug, 

And  one  low  piping  sound  more  sweet  than  all, — 

Stirring  the  air  with  such  an  harmony 

That  should  you  close  your  eyes  you  might  almost 

Forget  it  was  not  day !    On  moonlight  bushes, 

Whose  dewy  leaflets  are  but  half  disclosed, 

You  may  perchance  behold  them  on  the  twigs, 

Their  bright,  bright  eyes,  their  eyes  both  bright  and  full, 

Glistening,  while  many  a  glow-worm  in  the  shade 

Lights  up  her  love-torch. 

Here  the  phrasing  is  nearly  perfect,  and  the 
whole  effect  of  the  passage  shows  Coleridge  to 
be  one  of  the  real  masters  of  blank  verse.  Yet 
his  mastery  is  obviously  different  from  Milton's, 
and  one  of  the  differences  is  worth  examining. 
I  have  spoken  of  the  importance  of  the._verse- 
end  as  a  resting-place  in  the  rhythmical  series. 
All  poets  feel  this,  but  they  feel  it  in  varying 
degrees.  Evidently  Coleridge  felt  it  more 
vividly  than  Milton.  His  rhythmical  periods 
by  no  means  coincide  with  his  lines,  as  Surrey's 
did ;  but  neither  do  they  attain  such  liberty  as 
Milton's;  and  Coleridge  is  much  more  jealous 
than  the  greater  poet  of  the  integrity  of  his 
rhythmical  phrases.  Coleridge's  verse  is  rather 


60  English  Verse 

extreme;  but  the  practice  of  modern  poets  in 
general  is  nearer  to  his  than  to  Milton's. 

In  fact  Milton  thought  less  of  his  phrases 
than  of  his  periods,  and  less  even  of  his  periods 
than  of  those  still  larger  agglomerations  of 
units  which  I  have  called  rhythmical  para- 
graphs. The  individual  line  was  more  to  him 
than  to  Byron  ;  but  as  compared  with  most  other 
poets  he  seems  to  have  ignored  it,  and  to  have 
fixed  his  attention  on  the  paragraph's  longer 
swell  and  flow.  From  "Farewell,  happy  fields" 
to  the  end  of  our  extract  was  to  him  a  large 
rhythmic  entity,  and  he  cared  more  for  its 
cumulative  grandeur  than  for  the  individual 
periods  and  phrases  that  composed  it.  There  is 
a  passage  in  Paradise  Lost  in  which  a  hyphen- 
ated compound  ("wide-encroaching")  is  actu- 
ally broken  between  two  lines, — to  modern  ears, 
most  jarringly ; — but  this  is  obviously  due  to  his 
strong  sense  of  the  organic  unity  of  his  rhyth- 
mical paragraph. 

Tn  my  judgment,  Milton  is  still  the  greatest 
writer  of  blank  verse,  largely  because  of  the 
sonorous  sweep  and  majesty  of  these  para- 


Blank  Verse  61 

graphs ;  but  when  I  consider  his  phrasing  by 
itself,  I  find  myself  often  dissatisfied.  Such 
paragraphing  as  Milton's  and  such  phrasing 
as  Coleridge's  are  indeed  hardly  compatible ;  but 
there  are  many  passages  in  Milton's  verse  in 
which  one  feels  that  his  habit  of  large  utterance 
has  swept  him  too  far. 

Such  a  criticism,  however,  must  be  somewhat 
qualified  and  hedged  in.  Milton's  versification 
keeps  pace  with  his  style  and  with  his  thought. 
He  is  heroic  and  sublime  while  Coleridge  is  do- 
mestic and  sentimental;  and  in  poetry  on  the 
heroic  and  sublime  scale  one  may  well  maintain 
a  more  turbid  rhythm  and  a  more  active  conflict. 
Moreover,  we  must  remember  that  our  aesthetic 
judgments  are  relative,  not  absolute.  If  I,  with 
many  of  my  contemporaries,  prefer  a  rhythm 
more  tranquil  than  Milton's,  this  is  partly,  at 
least,  because  we  have  for  two  centuries  been 
eagerly  cultivating  the  art  of  rimed  verse ;  and 
rime,  as  subsequent  chapters  will  show,  favors 
tranquillity.  There  have  thus  become  fixed 
upon  our  rhythmic  sense  habits  of  which  we 
cannot  wholly  divest  ourselves;  or  if  we  do  so, 


62  English  Verse 

by  some  violent  effort  or  by  some  caprice  of 
personal  prejudice,  we  cannot  be  sure  that  our 
judicial  faculties  will  keep  their  poise. 

Whether,  therefore,  Milton's  verse  does  or 
does  not  in  these  respects  approach  nearest  to 
absolute  perfection,  no  one  knows  and  no  one  is 
competent  to  find  out.  After  all,  in  the  reading 
of  great  poetry  appreciation  is  more  important 
than  judgment;  the  latter  is  only  a  means  to 
the  former,  and  our  wisest  endeavor  will  be  to 
attain  a  sympathetic  comprehension  of  the 
rhythmical  spirit  by  which  each  poet  has  been 
directed.  When  we  read  Paradise  Lost  we 
should  surrender  ourselves  to  Milton's  para- 
graph sense ;  we  should  try  to  read  with  equal 
fairness  the  verse  of  Coleridge  and  such  verse 
(very  beautiful  though  very  different)  as  that 
quoted  from  Shelley  near  the  end  of  the  last 
chapter;  and  perhaps  on  rare  occasions  we 
should  even  try  to  enjoy  the  verse  of  Byron's 
Cain.  That,  however,  would  be  very  difficult. 

As  I  look  back  over  the  pages  of  this  chapter, 
I  feel  that  I  have  given  a  very  inadequate  ex- 
position of  the  greatness  of  blank  verse.  A  few 


Blank  Verse  63 

minor  details  of  its  charm  will  be  considered 
later ;  but  as  to  its  essential  principles,  unsatis- 
factory as  the  foregoing  discussion  must  seem,  I 
think  there  is  nothing  that  can  fitly  be  added  to 
it  in  a  book  of  this  nature.  I  have  read  many 
more  elaborate  treatises  on  metrical  law,  but 
the  chief  result  has  been  a  growing  conviction  of 
their  futility,  so  far  as  the  aesthetic  effective- 
ness of  metre  is  concerned.  The  fact  is,  after 
all  is  said,  that  the  great  glory  of  blank  verse 
is  not  solely  in  its  metre,  but  jointly  in  its  metre 
and  in  its  style.  If  the  words  are  mean,  or  if 
the  thoughts  are  mean,  majestic  and  cunningly 
conflicting  cadences  will  not  make  blank  verse 
noble  or  beautiful. 

Coleridge  improvised  a  definition  of  prose  as 
"words  in  their  best  order,"  and  of  poetry  as 
"the  best  words  in  the  best  order."  His  antith- 
esis between  prose  and  poetry  is  more  striking 
than  instructive,  but  in  his  definition  of  poetry 
there  is  profound  truth.  When  we  study  metre 
we  are  trying  to  study  not  the  best  words  in  the 
best  order,  but  only  the  best  order  by  itself. 
So  far  as  the  principles  of  metre  are  concerned, 


64  English  Verse 

the  terrible  cry  of  Satan — "Farewell,  happy 
fields" — might  just  as  well  be  a  dyspeptic's 
lament  over  fifteen  happy  meals.  The  great 
poet  shows  his  greatness  not  by  masterly 
rhythms,  but  by  molding  into  such  rhythms  the 
imaginings  of  genius  fitted  with  perfect  speech ; 
and  the  several  elements  of  his  art  are  so  joined 
that  no  man  may  put  them  asunder.  Elsewhere 
I  may  sometime  attempt  a  discussion  of  the 
principles  of  poetry  at  large ;  but  here  my  scope 
is  narrower  and  my  results  must  therefore  re- 
main meagre. 


CHAPTER  IV 
IRfmeD  pentameters 

RIMED  verse  is  easier  to  write  satisfactorily 
than  blank  verse,  because  the  ear,  when  cajoled 
by  rime  at  the  ends  of  the  lines,  does  not  demand 
so  high  a  degree  of  excellence  elsewhere.  It  is 
willing  to  accept  something  less  than  the  very 
best  words,  and  something  less  than  the  very  best 
order.  Still,  the  heroic  couplet  has  a  rare  beauty 
of  its  own,  and  is  in  its  peculiar  way  susceptible 
of  great  variety  and  charm;  and  while  poets 
have  perhaps  succeeded  with  it  oftener  than  with 
blank  verse,  I  doubt  if  so  many  have  succeeded 
supremely  well.  The  reason  for  this,  however, 
is  partly  historical;  for  in  the  18th  century  the 
couplet  was  much  abused,  and  so  fell  into  dis- 
favor ;  and  though  the  art  of  writing  it  was  re- 
discovered nearly  a  hundred  years  ago,  it  has 
never  regained  its  place  in  popular  esteem,  and 
few  poets  now  care  to  use  it. 

65 


66  English  Verse 

The  most  obvious  function  of  rime  is  purely 
decorative;  it  pleases  the  ear,  by  successively 
arousing  and  gratifying  expectation  in  new  and 
often  beautiful  ways.  But  the  most  obvious 
function  is  not  the  most  important.  Rime  also 
serves  to  emphasize  the  ends  of  the  lines,  and 
so  to  make  clear  the  exact  verse-length.  It  dis- 
plays the  metrical  structure  to  the  ear,  some- 
what as  the  printer's  indentions  display  it  to  the 
eye.  It  is  this  structural  function  of  rime  that 
complicates  the  art  of  writing  heroic  verse, 
creating  both  its  difficulties  and  its  higher  pos- 
sibilities ;  while  it  is  chiefly  the  decorative  func- 
tion that  tends  to  alleviate  those  difficulties  and 
so  to  encourage  mediocrity. 

In  blank  verse,  as  we  have  seen,  there  is  a 
charm  in  the  perpetual  variety  of  periodic 
lengths, — in  the  conflict  between  the  natural 
rhythmical  periods  and  the  artificial  limitations 
of  the  metre.  But  if  one  should  write  heroic 
verse  upon  the  same  principles,  the  presence  of 
rime  would  make  the  total  effect  utterly  illogi- 
cal. If  you  want  the  line-structure  to  be  per- 
petually threatened  with  submergence  by  the 


Rimed  Pentameters  67 

flow  of  the  rhythm,  why  should  you  hoist  a  flag 
on  the  end  of  every  line  ?  The  rime  in  such  verse 
would  be  really  something  of  an  annoyance ;  for 
either  it  would  effectually  distract  your  atten- 
tion from  the  higher  attractions  of  the  rhythm, 
or  else  it  would  itself  cease  to  be  noticed  except 
as  an  irregular  intruder.  One  or  the  other  of 
these  effects  the  reader  will  probably  discover 
in  Keats's  Endymion. 

A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  for  ever: 

Its  loveliness  increases;  it  will  never 

Pass  into  nothingness;  but  still  will  keep 

A  bower  quiet  for  us,  and  a  sleep 

Full  of  sweet  dreams,  and  health,  and  quiet  breathing. 

Therefore,  on  every  morrow,  are  we  wreathing 

A  flowery  band  to  bind  us  to  the  earth, 

Spite  of  despondence,  of  the  inhuman  dearth 

Of  noble  natures,  of  the  gloomy  days, 

Of  all  the  unhealthy  and  o'er-darkened  ways 

Made  for  our  searching. 

To  my  own  ear  this  kind  of  verse  would  have 
been  equally  pleasing,  and  in  many  passages 
more  so,  if  the  rime  had  been  simply  obliterated, 
somewhat  as  follows : 

A  thing  of  beauty  is  a  joy  for  ever: 
Its  loveliness  increases;  it  will  ne'er 
Pass  into  nothingness;  but  still  will  keep 


68  English  Verse 

A  bower  quiet  for  us,  and  a  slumber 

Full  of  sweet  dreams,  and  health,  and  quiet  brooding. 

Therefore,  on  every  morrow,  do  we  wreathe 

A  flowery  band  to  bind  us  to  this  world, 

Spite  of  despondence,  of  the  inhuman  dearth 

Of  noble  natures,  of  the  gloomy  years, 

Of  all  the  unhealthy  and  o'er-darkened  ways 

Made  for  our  searching. 

By  this  alteration  the  decorative  value  of  the 
rime  is  lost,  to  be  sure,  but  we  are  also  freed 
from  its  structural  embarrassments;  and  I 
think  that  in  the  original  the  latter  are  an  offset 
to  the  former.  As  we  shall  see,  this  is  a  criti- 
cism to  which  Keats  himself,  a  year  or  two 
later,  would  probably  have  assented. 

The  poets  of  the  "Augustan  age"  of  English 
literature, — Pope  and  the  rest, — had  some  un- 
derstanding of  the  difference  in  principle  be- 
tween heroic  and  blank  verse ;  but  they  were  even 
more  influenced  by  the  example  of  French  poets 
and  the  dogmas  of  French  criticism  than  they 
were  by  aesthetic  principles.  French  heroic 
verse  was  written  with  a  somewhat  uniform 
coincidence  between  metrical  lines  and  rhyth- 
mical periods, — for  reasons  grounded  in  the 
nature  of  the  French  language, — and  English 


Rimed  Pentameters  69 

imitators  adopted  the  same  style;  they  placed 
pauses  always  at  the  end  of  the  couplet  and 
very  frequently  at  the  end  of  the  first  verse. 
Thus  Pope  writes : 

Lo,  the  poor  Indian,  whose  untutored  mind 
Sees  God  in  clouds,  or  hears  him  in  the  wind; 
His  soul  proud  science  never  taught  to  stray 
Far  as  the  solar  walk  or  milky  way. 

And  thus  Goldsmith,  a  generation  later : 

111  fares  the  land,  to  hastening  ills  a  prey, 
Where  wealth  accumulates,  and  men  decay. 
Princes  and  lords  may  flourish  or  may  fade, — 
A  breath  can  make  them,  as  a  breath  has  made; 
But  a  bold  peasantry,  their  country's  pride, 
When  once  destroyed,  can  never  be  supplied. 

These  indeed  are  excellent  couplets,  while  if 
you  should  mutilate  them  as  I  did  those  of 
Keats,  you  would  get  detestable  blank  verse, — 
something  like  the  Earl  of  Surrey's.  In  couplet 
form,  these  lines  do  not  utterly  betray  the  monot- 
ony of  their  rhythmical  structure,  for  the  vary- 
ing rime  makes  each  couplet  different  from  its 
predecessor.  Moreover,  both  Pope  and  Gold- 
smith were  skilled  artificers,  and  within  the 
limitations  of  the  couplet  rule  they  achieved 
endless  variety,  as  is  partly  indicated  even  by 


70  English  Verse 

the  above  passages.  There  is  perpetual  con- 
flict between  the  ideal  scheme  and  the  actual 
expression,  in  respect  to  periodic  length,  tempo, 
weight  of  stress,  and  alternation  of  syllables; 
but  the  conflict  is  fought  out  within  the  stone 
walls  of  each  individual  couplet. 

Thus  the  18th  century  couplet  illustrates  the 
extreme  application  of  the  logic  of  rime.  We 
sometimes  call  Pope's  age  the  age  of  prose  and 
reason;  and  its  versification  is  evidently  highly 
reasonable,  wrhether  or  not  it  deserves  the  stigma 
of  prosiness.  Later  generations  revolted 
against  the  spirit  of  Pope's  age,  and  at  the  time 
of  our  romantic  movement  its  poetry  fell  into 
disrepute.  It  was  regarded  as  dry  and  ration- 
alistic; and  the  rigid  form  of  the  couplet,  be- 
coming identified  with  the  spirit  of  the  poetry, 
was  regarded  as  necessarily  dry  and  rationalis- 
tic too.  Poets  who  sought  to  discharge  in  verse 
their  more  delicate  or  ardent  emotions  demanded 
a  freer  scope ;  and  hence,  to  go  back  to  our 
former  example,  the  great  but  immature  genius 
of  Keats  was  misled. 

The  wholesale  condemnation  of  the  old  coup- 


Rimed  Pentameters  71 

let  was  partly  unjust;  for  the  very  essence  of 
all  verse  is  artifice  in  the  restriction  of  natural 
rhythm,  and  the  real  charge  against  the  couplet 
was  merely  that  it  was  artificial.  More  recently 
a  modicum  of  justice  has  been  accorded  to  it, 
and  it  is  now  generally  felt  that  Pope's  heroic 
verse  was  the  very  best  kind  for  the  sort  of 
poetry  that  Pope  aimed  at.  Whether  you  like 
it  in  romantic  poetry  or  not,  you  cannot  but 
acknowledge  its  excellence  for  satire,  burlesque, 
or  sententious  moralizing.  How  well  the  sense 
is  brought  out  by  the  strong  rime ! 

Nay,  fly  to  altars;  there  they'll  talk  you  dead, 
For  fools  rush  in  where  angels  fear  to  tread. 

And  how  pointless,  in  comparison,  would  be  such 
a  romantic  rhythm  as  this : 

Nay,  fly  to  altars;  still  the  same  old  bore, 
For  fools  rush  in  where  angels  would  be  more 
Reluctant. 

But  though  thus  much  justice  has  been  granted 
to  the  couplet,  I  do  not  feel  that  the  whole  truth 
is  yet  acknowledged.  Couplets  are  good  for 
epigram,  but  is  that  all?  Byron,  who  never 
quite  knew  whether  he  belonged  to  the  former 


72  English  Verse 

age  or  to  his  own,  could  use  them  effectively 
enough  in  the  18th  century  fashion,  as  in  that 
spiteful  fling  at  his  mother-in-law: 

Behold  the  blessings  of  a  lucky  lot! 
My  play  is  damned,  and  Lady  Noel  not! 

But  he  could  also  use  them  superbly  in  the  dis- 
play of  romantic  passion,  as  in  the  parting  of 
the  Corsair  and  Medora. 

She  rose,  she  sprung,  she  clung  to  his  embrace, 
Till  his  heart  heaved  beneath  her  hidden  face: 
He  dared  not  raise  to  his  that  deep-blue  eye, 
Which  downcast  drooped  in  tearless  agony.    .    .    . 
Again,  again,  that  form  he  madly  pressed, 
Which  mutely  clasped,  imploringly  caressed; 
And  tottering  to  the  couch  his  bride  he  bore, 
One  moment  gazed,  as  if  to  gaze  no  more; 
Felt  that  for  him  earth  held  but  her  alone, — 
Kissed  her  cold  forehead, — turned: — is  Conrad  gone? 

"And  is  he  gone?"    On  sudden  solitude 
How  oft  that  fearful  question  will  intrude! 
"  'Twas  but  an  instant  past,  and  here  he  stood ! 
And  now — ";  without  the  portal's  porch  she  rushed, 
And  then  at  length  her  tears  in  freedom  gushed; 
Big,  bright,  and  fast,  unknown  to  her  they  fell, 
But  still  her  lips  refused  to  send  "Farewell!" 
For  in  that  word — that  fatal  word — howe'er 
We  promise — hope — believe — there  breathes  despair. 

These  verses  are  somewhat  overcharged  with 
rhetorical  embellishments,  and  I  am  by  no  means 


Rimed  Pentameters  73 

presenting  them  as  a  model ;  but  they  neverthe- 
less prove  that  the  stiffest  couplet  form  is 
adaptable  to  real  poetic  uses.  Yet  though  this 
form  was  really  good,  there  are  other  styles  that 
are  still  better;  and  it  was  the  ultra-romantic 
Keats  that  developed  the  best  of  them  all. 
Keats  himself  was  abundantly  dissatisfied  with 
Endymion,  and  devoted  himself  to  the  study  of 
Dryden,  one  of  the  great  old  masters  of  the 
couplet.  The  result,  when  he  again  essayed 
heroic  verse  in  Lamia,  was  an  entirely  new  kind 
of  cadence. 

As  men  talk  in  a  dream,  so  Corinth  all, 
Throughout  her  palaces  imperial, 
And  all  her  populous  streets  and  temples  lewd, 
Muttered,  like  tempest  in  the  distance  brewed, 
To  the  wide-spreaded  night  above  her  towers. 
Men,  women,  rich  and  poor,  in  the  cool  hours, 
Shuffled  their  sandals  o'er  the  pavement  white, 
Companioned  or  alone;  while  many  a  light 
Flared  here  and  there  from  wealthy  festivals, 
And  threw  their  moving  shadows  on  the  walls, 
Or  found  them  clustered  in  the  corniced  shade 
Of  some  arched  temple  door  or  dusky  colonnade. 

This  kind  of  verse  is  obviously  composed  upon 
principles  already  familiar.  Much  that  I  have 
said  of  blank  verse  might  be  verbally  repeated 


74  English  Verse 

here,  with  the  single  change  of  the  word  line  to 
couplet.  For  example,  the  poet  does  not  pause 
at  the  end  of  each  couplet;  but  on  the  other 
hand  he  must  never  forget  that  couplets  are 
what  he  is  really  writing.  There  is  real  value  in 
the  couplet-structure  in  Lamia, — as  there  was 
not  in  Endymion, — for  it  marks  the  boundaries 
of  the  ideal  scheme  into  which  the  poet's  thought 
is  to  be  compressed,  and  with  which  the  thought 
is  in  perpetual  conflict.  The  rhythmical  periods 
are  always  trying  to  free  themselves  from  the 
bondage  of  the  couplet-structure,  but  never  suc- 
ceeding ;  and  the  end  of  each  couplet,  even  when 
rhythm  and  sense  run  past  it,  is  still  present 
to  our  consciousness  as  a  point  of  theoretical 
rest. 

In  short,  we  have  here  the  same  old  conflict, 
though  with  modifications.  The  line-structure 
is  reinforced  by  the  couplet-structure,  and  thus 
the  grip  on  the  rhythm  is  tightened;  but  the 
conflict  is  still  present,  and  affords  a  continuing 
interest  to  the  reader's  ear.  All  that  a  poet 
knows  or  instinctively  feels  about  the  art  of 
blank  verse  he  can  put  in  practice  in  heroic 


Rimed  Pentameters  75 

verse, — with  the  proper  allowances.  He  will 
find  satisfaction  not  only  in  phrases  and  periods 
but  also  in  the  longer  rhythmical  paragraph,  as 
Milton  did ;  and  his  paragraphs  will  gain  charm 
from  their  varying  relations  to  the  couplet- 
structure.  In  the  passage  from  Lamia,  for  in- 
stance, the  reader  will  instinctively  be  aware  of 
a  certain  difference  between  the  first  paragraph, 
which  begins  with  one  couplet  and  ends  in  the 
middle  of  another,  and  the  second  paragraph, 
which  begins  in  the  middle  of  a  couplet  and  ends 
in  the  middle  of  a  line  or  at  the  end  of  a  couplet, 
— whichever  you  please.  (I  am  using  the  term 
paragraph,  like  many  other  terms,  to  illustrate 
important  principles ;  but  I  do  not  claim  for  it 
mathematical  precision.) 

An  irregularity  is  noticeable  at  the  end  of  our 
last  extract:  it  ends  with  an  Alexandrine, — a 
verse  of  six  stresses.  Alexandrines  were  com- 
monly used  by  many  of  the  heroic  writers  of  the 
17th  and  18th  centuries,  and  when  the  couplet 
was  kept  pretty  rigid  it  may  have  seemed  a 
welcome  variation.  There  are  many  instances 
of  its  effective  use,  though  in  the  Lamia  passage 


76  English  Verse 

I  think  it  might  better  have  been  cut  down.  It 
affords  variety,  certainly;  but  the  question  is 
whether  the  variety  is  needed;  whether,  indeed, 
the  poet's  art  has  not  a  purer  and  better  effect 
when  it  plays  only  within  the  limits  of  the  fixed 
form.  But  this  is  the  whole  question  between 
two  schools  of  poetry  and  criticism,  and  is  not 
only  too  large  for  our  present  scope  but  proba- 
bly incapable  of  definitive  settlement  anywhere. 
I  have  no  right  to  say  more  than  this :  that  the 
kind  of  pleasure  which  I  myself  receive  from  the 
best  couplets  is  generally  hindered  rather  than 
heightened  by  the  occasional  Alexandrine. 

This  same  diffidence  becomes  us  well  whenever 
we  make  any  assertions  about  the  various 
schools  of  versification.  I  have  expressed  my 
opinions  somewhat  dogmatically,  perhaps,  about 
Keats,  Pope,  and  others;  but  I  make  no  pre- 
tence of  authority;  indeed,  I  deny  that  any 
individual,  or  any  generation,  can  be  an  author- 
ity in  such  matters.  A  keener  sensitiveness  than 
my  own  to  the  decorative  beauty  of  rime,  or 
perhaps  a  less  docile  regard  for  its  structural 
function,  would  make  a  reader  take  greater  de- 


Rimed  Pentameters  77 

light  in  Endymion  than  I  can  take.  In  judg- 
ing of  the  various  styles  of  the  real  masters  of 
heroic  verse, — in  judging  the  couplets  of  Lamia, 
The  Canterbury  Tales,  the  Satires  of  Dryden, 
or  Leigh  Hunt's  Story  of  Rimini, — critics  will 
always  differ,  according  as  their  sympathies  are 
with  one  side  or  the  other  in  the  conflict.  But 
though  we  may  not  safely  say  just  how  the  con- 
flict should  be  conducted,  we  may  be  very  posi- 
tive in  asserting  that  it  is  the  conflict  that  makes 
the  verse  good ;  and  I  myself,  though  I  concede 
that  the  best  blank  verse  is  finer  than  the  best 
possible  couplets,  nevertheless  look  upon  the  lat- 
ter as  a  very  subtle  and  beautiful  medium  of 
poetic  expression. 

We  now  leave  the  couplet,  and  will  consider 
the  effect  of  rime  in  more  complex  combinations. 
In  all  stanza-forms  rime  still  performs  its  two 
functions,  one  decorative  and  the  other  struc- 
tural; and  the  latter  function  must  now  be  ex- 
amined somewhat  more  attentively.  Rime 
marks  the  ends  of  the  lines,  and  so  not  only 
emphasizes  the  line-structure  but  also  marks 


78  English  Verse 

(we  may  almost  say  makes)  the  structure  of  the 
stanza. 

The  curfew  tolls  the  knell  of  parting  day, 
The  lowing  herd  winds  slowly  o'er  the  lea, 

The  ploughman  homeward  plods  his  weary  way, 
And  leaves  the  world  to  darkness  and  to  me. 

Now  fades  the  glimmering  landscape  on  the  sight, 
And  all  the  air  a  solemn  stillness  holds, 

Save  where  the  beetle  wheels  his  droning  flight, 
And  drowsy  tinklings  lull  the  distant  folds. 

These  stanzas  are  rhythmical  paragraphs 
made  up  of  four  similar  rhythmical  periods. 
Each  period  has  its  own  interior  rhythm, 
marked  by  five  stresses  separated  by  equal  inter- 
vals of  time;  but  the  periods  themselves  are 
grouped  together  in  the  larger  rhythm  of  the 
stanza,  and  the  rime  displays  their  grouping. 

The  elementary  principles  of  the  stanza  may 
best  be  exhibited  by  experimental  variations. 
Suppose,  for  instance,  that  Gray  had  arranged 
the  lines  of  his  elegy  in  couplets,  as  follows : 

The  curfew  tolls  the  knell  of  parting  day, 
The  ploughman  homeward  plods  his  weary  way; 
The  lowing  herd  winds  slowly  o'er  the  lea, 
And  leaves  the  world  to  darkness  and  to  me. 


Rimed  Pentameters  79 

Now  fades  the  glimmering  landscape  on  the  sight, 
Save  where  the  beetle  wheels  his  droning  flight, 
And  all  the  air  a  solemn  stillness  holds, 
And  drowsy  tinklings  lull  the  distant  folds. 

These  are  not  very  good  couplets.  Not  only 
are  they  rigidly  separated  by  final  pauses,  but 
each  couplet  is  rigid  in  its  internal  structure; 
for  each  line  is  a  separate  period  and  each 
period  (with  a  few  exceptions)  is  a  rigid  succes- 
sion of  five  strong  stresses.  Yet  the  poem  as 
Gray  wrote  it  is  perhaps  the  best  loved  poem  in 
our  language,  and  no  one  doubts  that  it  de- 
serves our  affection. 

The  explanation  is  simple.  We  saw  at  the 
beginning  of  this  chapter  that  rime  in  heroic 
couplets  beguiles  the  ear  and  partly  obviates  the 
necessity  of  subtle  variations  in  the  rhythm. 
Still  more,  as  we  now  see,  does  the  stanzaic 
rhythm,  reinforced  by  stanzaic  rime,  afford  a 
sufficing  charm  of  its  own.  Indeed,  we  are 
tempted  for  the  present  to  go  even  farther  than 
this :  for  as  in  the  couplet  the  freedom  of  blank 
verse  would  be  positively  irksome  (teste  Endy- 
mion),  so  here  the  larger  rhythm  of  the  stanza 
seems  to  reject  even  such  freedom  as  the  couplet 


ITY 


8o  English  Verse 

demands.  The  couplet  is  very  short;  its  ideal 
scheme  is  easily  carried  by  the  ear,  and  we 
relish  the  conflict  between  the  scheme  and  the 
actual  periods;  but  Gray's  stanza  is  longer, 
and  in  proportion  to  its  length  and  complexity 
its  ideal  scheme  makes  a  greater  demand  on  the 
carrying  power  of  the  ear.  Hence  the  ideal 
scheme  is  allowed  to  enforce  its  authority  over 
the  rhythmical  periods  more  autocratically. 
Let  us  try  another  experiment. 

The  lowing  herd  winds  slowly  o'er  the  lea, 
The  curfew  tolls  the  knell  of  parting  day, 
The  ploughman  homeward  plods  his  weary  way, 

And  leaves  the  world  to  darkness  and  to  me. 

Now  fades  the  glimmering  landscape  on  the  sight, 
And  drowsy  tinklings  lull  the  distant  folds, 
And  all  the  air  a  solemn  stillness  holds, 

Save  where  the  beetle  wheels  his  droning  flight. 

The  effect  of  this  arrangement  is  still  pleasing, 
— perhaps  almost  as  pleasing  as  the  original, — 
but  it  is  very  different.  The  rime  does  not  so 
vividly  display  the  rhythm  of  the  stanza;  it 
rather  slightly  obscures  and  blunts  it;  for  the 
lines  which  our  ears  paired  together  in  the 
original  rhythmical  scheme, — the  first  and 


Rimed  Pentameters  81 

third,  and  the  second  and  fourth, — are  now  not 
paired  by  the  rime,  but  divorced.  A  pleasing 
stanzaic  rhythm  is  present,  but  there  is  less  sing- 
song emphasis  upon  it.  Now  in  all  stanza- 
forms  the  rime  plays  its  part  in  one  or  the  other 
of  these  two  ways,  and  often  in  both ;  that  is,  it 
displays  the  stanzaic  structure,  or  it  obscures 
it,  or  it  partly  displays  and  partly  obscures  it. 
In  general,  simple  display  is  more  popular ;  for 
in  stanzas  the  sing-song  effect  is  rather  agree- 
able than  otherwise.  We  have  seen  that  a  con- 
sistent regularity  in  couplets  is  better  than  a 
consistent  regularity  in  single  lines;  and  so, 
when  we  write  not  couplets  but  comparatively 
large  groups  of  lines,  regularity  becomes  a 
desideratum,  and  we  like  to  have  it  brought 
forcibly  to  our  attention. 

The  general  principles  that  govern  stanzas 
made  of  heroic  lines  are  indicated  in  the  fore- 
going paragraphs,  but  one  of  the  inferences 
drawn  from  Gray's  stanza  was  only  provisional, 
and  needs  considerable  modification.  Of  stanzas 
in  general  it  is  not  true  that  internal  rigidity  is 


82  English  Verse 

essential.  The  fairly  regular  coincidence  of 
line  with  rhythmical  period  which  we  find  in  the 
Elegy  is  due  to  Gray's  individual  taste, — a 
taste  formed  in  the  days  of  the  rigid  couplet; 
and  the  same  stanza-form  admits  of  consider- 
able variation.  Thus  Wordsworth  writes : 

Ah  then  if  mine  had  been  the  painter's  hand 

To  express  what  then  I  saw;  and  add  the  gleam, 

The  light  that  never  was  on  sea  or  land, 
The  consecration,  and  the  poet's  dream; 

and  William  Watson  (in  a  stanza  referring  to 
Burns,  Wordsworth,  and  Coleridge)  goes  even 
farther  in  breaking  up  the  rhythm : 

Bright  was  his  going  forth,  but  clouds  ere  long 
Whelmed  him;  in  gloom  his  radiance  set,  and  those 

Twin  morning  stars  of  the  new  century's  song, 
Those  morning  stars  that  sang  together,  rose. 

These  stanzas  have  a  charm  wholly  distinct 
from  that  of  Gray's  Elegy,  and  we  may  legiti- 
mately prefer  either  one  or  the  other,  according 
to  our  varying  moods.  I  think,  however,  that 
most  readers,  in  most  kinds  of  poetry,  will  find 
greater  satisfaction  when  the  ideal  scheme  and 
the  actual  measures  are  to  some  extent  in  con- 


Rimed  Pentameters  83 

flict ;  and  that  in  Mr.  Watson's  beautiful  poem 
(Wordsworth's  Grave)  even  so  extreme  an  ex- 
ample as  the  stanza  last  quoted  is  a  delightful 
variation.  But  in  general  we  certainly  do  not 
want  as  much  freedom  of  conflict  in  the  stanza 
as  we  demand  in  the  couplet.  The  end  of  a 
stanza,  especially,  is  almost  always  marked  by 
a  substantial  pause. 

For  one  more  illustration  of  the  same  subject 
I  quote  the  first  stanzas  of  The  Faerie  Queene 
and  Shelley's  Adonais. 

A  gentle  knight  was  pricking  on  the  plaine, 
Ycladd  in  mightie  armes  and  silver  shielde, 
Wherein  old  dints  of  deepe  wounds  did  remaine, 
The  cruel  marks  of  many  a  bloody  fielde; 
Yet  armes  till  that  time  did  he  never  wield; 
His  angry  steede  did  chide  his  foming  bitt, 
As  much  disdayning  to  the  curbe  to  yield; 
Full  jolly  knight  he  seemd,  and  faire  did  sitt, 
As  one  for  knightly  giusts  and  fierce  encounters  fitt. 

I  weep  for  Adonais — he  is  dead ! 
O,  weep  for  Adonais !  though  our  tears 
Thaw  not  the  frost  which  binds  so  dear  a  head! 
And  thou,  sad  hour,  selected  from  all  years 
To  mourn  our  loss,  rouse  thy  obscure  compeers 
And  teach  them  thine  own  sorrow ;  say,  with  me 
Died  Adonais;  till  the  future  dares 
Forget  the  past,  his  fate  and  fame  shall  be 
An  echo  and  a  light  unto  eternity. 


84  English  Verse 

Shelley's  treatment  of  this  form, — the  Spen- 
serian stanza, — suggests  more  of  the  poet's  fine 
frenzy  than  Spenser's  own.  Here,  again,  I 
myself  take  more  pleasure  in  the  freer  treat- 
ment; but  I  also  feel  that  in  a  stanza  of  this 
length  it  is  somewhat  perilous.  A  long  and 
complicated  stanza,  while  it  has  the  great  ad- 
vantage of  affording  more  opportunity  for 
variety,  is  much  more  difficult  to  carry  in  the 
head;  and  when  the  form  is  not  distinctly  em- 
phasized by  rhythm  as  well  as  rime,  it  will  be 
lost  upon  untrained  ears,  or  upon  ears  that  lack 
the  carrying  power.  Many  persons,  I  am  con- 
vinced, read  Adonais  with  very  little  perception 
of  its  stanzaic  structure ;  and  such  persons  are 
quite  right  in  saying  that  for  them  the  liberty 
of  the  conflict  is  carried  too  far.  Others  again, 
with  no  such  defect  of  ear,  may  on  grounds  of 
taste  prefer  a  stricter  adherence  to  the  Spen- 
serian scheme;  and  with  such  persons  it  would 
be  impertinent  for  me  to  argue. 

The  most  widely  cultivated  stanza-form  is 
that  of  the  Italian  sonnet.  The  term  sonnet 


Rimed  Pentameters  85 

was  formerly  applied  to  various  kinds  of  lyrics 
and  ballads  without  reference  to  their  form,  and 
it  is  still  used  of  two  widely  different  types  of 
composition,  the  Italian  or  Miltonic  sonnet,  and 
the  Elizabethan  or  Shakespearean.  These  are 
alike  in  hardly  any  respect  except  that  each  is 
a  stanzaic  group  of  fourteen  lines.  The  Eliza- 
bethan sonnet  is  so  simple  in  structure  that  it 
needs  no  special  comment  here,  but  the  Italian, 
— which  has  somewhat  unjustly  ousted  the  other 
from  critical  favor, — is  a  peculiarly  interesting 
illustration  of  our  principles. 

The  Italian  sonnet  consists  of  two  parts,  an 
octave  (of  eight  lines}  and  a  sestet  (of  six 
lines).  The  lines  of  the  octave  rime  in  the  order 
abbaabba, — occasional  departures  from  the  or- 
der being  so  rare  as  to  be  negligible.  The  rimes 
in  the  sestet  are  arranged  in  various  ways,  but 
are  always  different  from  those  of  the  octave. 
Among  the  common  schemes  are  cdecde,  ccdeed, 
cdcdcd.  A  sonnet  from  Rossetti's  House  of 
Life,  entitled  Lovesight,  will  illustrate  the 
form. 


86  English  Verse 

When  do  I  see  thee  most,  beloved  one? 
When  in  the  light  the  spirits  of  mine  eyes 
Before  thy  face,  their  altar,  solemnize 

The  worship  of  that  Love  through  thee  made  known? 

Or  when  in  the  dusk  hours,  (we  two  alone,) 
Close-kissed  and  eloquent  of  still  replies 
Thy  twilight-hidden  glimmering  visage  lies, 

And  my  soul  only  sees  thy  soul  its  own? 

O  love,  my  love!    If  I  no  more  should  see 
Thyself,  nor  on  the  earth  the  shadow  of  thee, 

Nor  image  of  thine  eyes  in  any  spring, — 
How  then  should  sound  upon  Life's  darkening  slope 
The  ground-whirl  of  the  perished  leaves  of  Hope, 

The  wind  of  Death's  imperishable  wing? 

In  this  sonnet  a  difference  in  tone  is  to  be 
noted  between  the  octave  and  the  sestet.  The 
lines  that  belong  to  the  first  rime-system  express 
the  first  part  of  the  poet's  thought,  and  the  lines 
of  the  second  rime-system  express  the  second. 
At  precisely  the  end  of  the  eighth  line  the  reader 
feels  that  he  has  reached  the  end  of  something 
like  a  stanza  within  a  stanza.  It  is  now-a-days 
the  usual  practice  to  break  sonnets  in  this  man- 
ner, and  there  are  two  obvious  reasons  of  com- 
mon sense  for  so  doing.  First,  if  the  rime- 
scheme  does  not  bear  some  such  close  relation  to 
the  sense,  it  seems  meaningless.  Second,  it  is 


Rimed  Pentameters  87 

only  by  breaking  up  the  sonnet  into  two  parts 
that  the  reader  can  be  enabled  easily  to  grasp 
its  form.  A  sonnet  is  too  long  and  complicated 
to  be  felt  as  a  stanza;  but  an  octave,  running 
upon  only  two  rimes  and  always  arranged  in 
the  same  way,  is  easily  comprehended,  while  a 
sestet,  being  shorter  still,  may  be  varied  with 
some  freedom  and  yet  be  perfectly  intelligible. 
Rossetti  always  pauses  at  the  end  of  his  octave, 
and  consequently  the  reader  of  his  sonnets  is 
always  pleasantly  conscious  of  their  form;  but 
when  sonnets  are  divided  at  haphazard,  accord- 
ing to  any  poet's  convenience  or  caprice,  their 
form  does  not  impress  itself  at  all  at  first  read- 
ing, and  even  upon  re-reading  it  may  seem  to 
lack  justification.  Compare  with  Rossetti's 
Lovesight  the  following, — one  of  Mrs.  Brown- 
ing's Sonnets  from  the  Portuguese. 

"My  future  will  not  copy  my  fair  past" — 
I  wrote  that  once;  and  thinking  at  my  side 
My  ministering  life-angel  justified 

The  word  by  his  appealing  look  upcast 

To  the  white  throne  of  God,  I  turned  at  last, 
And  there,  instead,  saw  thee,  not  unallied 
To  angels  in  thy  soul !    Then  I,  long  tried 

By  natural  ills,  received  the  comfort  fast, 


88  English  Verse 

While  budding,  at  thy  sight,  my  pilgrim's  staff 
Gave  out  green  leaves  with  morning  dews  impearled. 

I  seek  no  copy  now  of  life's  first  half: 
Leave  here  the  pages  with  long  musing  curled, 

And  write  me  new  my  future's  epigraph, 
New  angel  mine,  unhoped  for  in  the  world ! 

Yet  there  is  another  side  of  the  question. 
Some  poets  have  felt  that  the  sonnet-form,  as 
explained  above,  is  too  rigid  and  mechanical, 
and  have  treated  it  as  Keats  treated  the  coup- 
let. The  form  of  the  sonnet  just  quoted  is 
roughly  comparable,  in  principle,  with  the 
couplet-form  in  Endymion,  and  I  think  every 
one  will  agree  that  it  is  too  loose ;  but  a  sort  of 
Lamia-form  has  been  used  often  and  with  great 
success.  Wordsworth,  most  notably,  was  very 
fond  of  breaking  the  thought  and  the  rhyth- 
mic continuity  of  his  sonnets  not  exactly  at 
the  end  of  the  octave,  but  perhaps  just  before 
or  just  after  it.  Here  is  a  familiar  specimen  of 
his  workmanship, — a  sonnet  on  the  sonnet. 


Nuns  fret  not  at  their  convent's  narrow  room; 

And  hermits  are  contented  with  their  cells; 

And  students  with  their  pensive  citadels; 
Maids  at  the  wheel,  the  weaver  at  his  loom, 


Rimed  Pentameters  89 

Sit  blithe  and  happy;  bees  that  soar  for  bloom, 
High  as  the  highest  peak  of  Furness-fells, 
Will  murmur  by  the  hour  in  foxglove  bells: 

In  truth  the  prison,  unto  which  we  doom 

Ourselves,  no  prison  is:  and  hence  for  me 
In  sundry  moods,  'twas  pastime  to  be  bound 
Within  the  Sonnet's  scanty  plot  of  ground; 
Pleased  if  some  souls  (for  such  there  needs  must  be) 
Who  have  felt  the  weight  of  too  much  liberty, 
Should  find  brief  solace  there,  as  I  have  found. 

Why  is  not  this  really  better  than  Rossetti's 
kind?  Why  does  it  not  give  us  a  higher 
pleasure,  by  suggesting  a  conflict  between  the 
thought  and  the  sonnet-form?  The  ideal  scheme 
prescribes  an  octave  and  a  sestet,  and  the 
thought  is  forced  into  the  mold,  but  refuses  to 
submit  to  an  exact  fit,  exactly  as  it  does  in  the 
couplets  of  Lamia ;  and  I  think  we  can  perceive 
a  beauty  in  the  very  freedom  of  the  Words- 
worthian  movement  which  Rossetti's  sonnets 
lack.  Nevertheless  I  prefer  Rossetti's  strict- 
ness, and  regard  Rossetti  as  our  greatest  master 
of  the  sonnet-form.  My  ear  cannot  grasp  oc- 
taves and  sestets  as  readily  as  it  can  grasp 
couplets,  and  it  therefore  is  better  pleased  when 
their  integrity  is  preserved  and  emphasized; 


90  English  Verse 

and  octaves  and  sestets,  as  compared  with  coup- 
lets, offer  so  much  more  freedom  within  their  own 
limits  that  I  feel  no  need  of  variation  in  the 
limits  themselves. 

Contemporary  opinion  seems  to  be  mainly  on 
the  same  side ;  but  those  who  prefer  the  remoter 
charm  of  the  Wordsworthian  form  are  perhaps 
the  happy  possessors  of  more  retentive  ears  than 
ours ;  and  in  any  case  I  do  not  see  how  we  can 
safely  pronounce  their  taste  inferior.  The 
critical  reader  may  fancy  that  I  myself  am  not 
wholly  consistent,  for  it  might  not  be  easy  to 
reconcile  these  remarks  with  what  I  have  said 
above  about  the  Spenserian  stanza.  If  there  is 
any  inconsistency  here  I  do  not  apologize  for 
it;  but  I  recognize  that  it  behooves  me  to  be 
cautious  in  criticizing  others. 


CHAPTER  V 

/flMscelianeoue  /Bbetree 

THE  superiority  of  the  iambic  pentameter  has 
been  partly  explained  already.  It  is  unsym- 
metrical,  and  therefore  admits  of  freer  division 
and  more  variety  than  lines  of  four  stresses,  or 
of  six.  The  line  of  three  stresses  is  equally  un- 
symmetrical,  but  is  too  short  to  admit  much 
variety  of  treatment.  This  is  partly  a  mere 
matter  of  mathematics,  since  six  syllables  ob- 
viously cannot  be  arranged  in  as  many  ways  as 
ten ;  but  it  is  also  to  be  observed  that  the  short- 
ness of  the  line  restricts  the  operation  of  the 
law  of  conflict.  The  ends  of  the  lines  come  so 
near  together  that  the  line-structure  is  forcibly 
emphasized  and  becomes  the  dominant  feature 
of  the  rhythm ;  it  is  impracticable  for  the  rhyth- 
mical periods  to  gain  their  independence.  Poets 
feel  this  instinctively,  and  when  they  write  verse 
of  three  stresses  they  make  no  effort  to  treat  it 

91 


92  English  Verse 

as  they  treat  blank  verse;  they  let  the  conflict 
between  the  line-structure  and  the  rhythmical 
periods  almost  disappear,  and  rely  almost  wholly 
on  their  other  resources.  Perhaps  the  most 
familiar  example  of  this  verse  is  in  Tennyson's 
Maud. 

O,  let  the  solid  ground 

Not  fail  beneath  my  feet 
Before  my  life  has  found 

Wha,t  some  have  found  so  sweet! 
Then  let  come  what  come  may, 

What  matter  if  I  go  mad, 
I  shall  have  had  my  day. 

The   same   thought   might   be   expressed   in 
blank  verse  somewhat  as  follows : 

O  let  the  solid  ground  not  fail  beneath  me, 
Before  my  life  has  found  what  some  have  found 
So  passing  sweet !    Then  let  come  whs t  come  will, 
Though  I  go  mad,  I  shall  have  had  my  day. 

This  transformation  brings  gain  as  well  as 
loss.  By  smoothing  out  the  jerkiness  of  the 
line-structure  we  have  given  to  the  first  sentence 
a  new  kind  of  dignity  and  force;  and  the  last 
words  of  the  sentence,  by  their  isolated  position 
as  a  detached  rhythmical  phrase,  have  received 


Miscellaneous  Metres  93 

a  pleasing  kind  of  emphasis  which  is  almost 
wholly  foreign  to  the  shorter  metre.  On  the 
other  hand,  we  have  lost  the  sing-song  simplicity 
of  the  original,  and  all  the  charm  of  the  rime, 
both  structural  and  decorative ;  and  there  was 
in  Tennyson's  stanza  a  striking  effectiveness  in 
the  very  shortness  of  the  lines, — in  the  emphasis 
that  came  from  the  crisp  reiteration  of  the 
rhythm, — which  is  foreign  to  blank  verse. 

The  reader  will  see  that  the  short  metre  is 
essentially  lyrical.  It  is  well  suited  to  the  sim- 
ple expression  of  a  simple  feeling.  In  songs 
that  are  actually  sung  everyone  knows  that 
subtle  complexities  of  expression  are  ineffective ; 
and  so  in  those  poems  that  we  still  call  lyrics, — 
even  though  now-a-days  the  lyrist  carries  no 
lyre, — a  song-like  metre,  accompanied  with  rime 
and  arranged  in  stanza-form,  accords  best  with 
the  straightforwardness  of  simple  passion.  If 
Tennyson  had  wished  in  this  part  of  his  poem 
to  express  subtler  delicacies  of  feeling,  or  if  he 
had  wished  for  more  stateliness  and  dignity  of 
utterance,  he  might  have  chosen  blank  verse. 
If,  on  the  other  hand,  he  had  been  writing  blank 


94  English  Verse 

verse,  he  would  probably  not  have  written  any 
such  lines  as  I  have  given  above.  His  concep- 
tion would  have  been  likely  to  clothe  itself  spon- 
taneously in  more  stately  language,  and  to  fol- 
low more  intricate  byways  of  feeling  rather 
than  the  straight  highway.  His  hero  might 
then  have  expressed  himself  somewhat  as  King 
Arthur  did,  under  stress  of  a  similar  emotion : 

What  happiness  to  reign  a  lonely  king, 
Vext — O  ye  stars  that  shudder  over  me, 

0  earth  that  soundest  hollow  under  me, — 
Vext  with  waste  dreams?  for  saving  I  be  joined 
To  her  that  is  the  fairest  under  heaven, 

1  seem  as  nothing,    .    .    . 

This  perhaps  sounds  a  trifle  artificial,  detached 
from  its  context ;  but  when  we  read  it  as  part 
of  the  whole  Idyll  we  are  keyed  up  in  advance 
to  the  level  of  blank  verse,  and  it  sounds  digni- 
fied and  natural ;  and  it  is  clear  that  its  effect- 
iveness would  be  ruined  if  the  thought  were  cut 
up  into  lines  of  six  syllables  each. 

The  three-stress  line,  then,  though  unsym- 
metrical,  derives  no  great  advantage  from  its 
lack  of  symmetry;  and  it  clearly  has  no  right 


Miscellaneous  Metres  95 

to  share  the  name  "heroic."  The  seven-stress 
line  is  also  unsymmetrical,  and  it  might  seem 
that  it  should  afford  even  better  scope  to  the 
poet's  art  than  the  line  of  five  stresses;  but  a 
brief  inspection  will  show  that  it  does  not.  I 
quote  from  a  well-known  stanza  of  Byron's. 

Oh  could  I  feel  as  I  have  felt,  or  be  what  I  have  been, 
Or  weep  as  I  could  once  have  wept,  o'er  many  a  vanished 

scene; 
As  springs  in  deserts   found  seem  sweet,   all  brackish 

though  they  be, 
So,  midst  the  withered  waste  of  life,  those  tears  would 

flow  to  me. 

As  we  follow  this  rhythm  we  instinctively  feel  a 
division  in  each  line  after  the  fourth  stress,  and, 
though  the  two  periods  into  which  the  line  is 
thus  broken  are  apparently  unequal,  we  in  fact 
equalize  them  by  an  involuntary  pause  at  the 
verse-end. 

Now  it  is  obviously  not  necessary  to  make  this 
equal  division.  There  is,  indeed,  one  line  in 
Byron's  poem  which  is  differently  divided: 

'Tis  not  on  youth's  smooth  cheek  the  blush  alone,  which 
fades  so  fast; 


96  English  Verse 

but  there  is  only  one  such.  The  fact  is  simply 
that  the  metre  is  too  long  to  be  conveniently  ac- 
cepted by  the  ear  as  a  unit ;  we  cannot  comfort- 
ably carry  it  in  our  heads,  and  therefore  the 
poets  break  it  up  for  us.  For  the  same  reason, 
they  almost  always  break  it  up  in  one  particular 
way.  If  they  treated  it  as  they  treat  the  heroic 
line,  putting  pauses  here,  there,  and  everywhere, 
— sometimes  letting  the  periods  overrun  the 
lines  and  sometimes  not, — they  would  indeed 
find  large  scope  for  the  art  of  variety ;  but  there 
would  be  none  of  the  pleasure  of  the  conflict,  for 
the  line-structure  would  be  too  weak  to  assert 
itself  in  our  rhythmical  consciousness.  In  very 
short  metres  the  rhythmical  periods  surrender 
to  the  line-structure  because  it  is  useless  for 
them  to  struggle  against  it ;  in  long  ones  they 
surrender  out  of  magnanimity  to  a  helpless 
antagonist;  but  in  neither  case  can  there  be 
much  conflict  between  the  two.  The  single 
specimen  quoted  above  from  Byron's  poem  shows 
fairly  well  the  extent  to  which  the  conflict  can 
be  carried  in  seven-stress  verse, — though  of 
course  more  extreme  examples  might  be  quoted ; 


Miscellaneous  Metres  97 

and  the  reader  will  readily  see,  without  further 
demonstration,  that  the  longer  metres,  like  the 
shorter,  are  lyric  rather  than  epic  in  character. 


It  should  now  be  easy  to  see  why  the  name 
blank  verse  has  been  so  completely  monopolized 
by  the  decasyllabic  metre.  No  other  form  of 
rimeless  verse  has  ever  won  a  high  enough  place 
to  challenge  the  title;  and  the  reason  for  this 
may  be  shown  by  a  simple  illustration.  I  take 
a  passage  from  Whittier's  Snowbound,  a  poem 
written  in  rimed  octosyllabics,  and  I  obliterate 
the  rime  as  I  did  once  before  in  a  passage  from 
Keats. 


What  matter  how  the  wind  behaved? 

What  matter  how  the  north-wind  stormed? 

Not  all  the  wind-swept  sheets  of  rain 

Could  quench  our  hearth-fire's  ruddy  glow. 

O  Time  and  Change !  with  hair  as  white 

As  was  my  sire's  that  winter  day, 

How  strange  it  seems,  with  so  much  lost 

Of  life  and  love,  to  still  live  on ! 

Ah  brother,  only  you  and  I 

Are  left  of  all  that  circle  now, — 

The  dear  home  faces  whereupon 

The  fitful  firelight  paled  and  gleamed. 


98  English  Verse 

There  is  certainly  nothing  very  bad  about  this ; 
but  compare  the  original: 

What  matter  how  the  wind  behaved? 
What  matter  how  the  north-wind  raved? 
Blow  high,  blow  low,  not  all  its  snow 
Could  quench  our  hearth-fire's  ruddy  glow. 
O  Time  and  Change !  with  hair  as  gray- 
As  was  my  sire's  that  winter  day, 
How  strange  it  seems,  with  so  much  gone 
Of  life  and  love,  to  still  live  on ! 
Ah  brother,  only  I  and  thou 
Are  left  of  all  that  circle  now, — 
The  dear  home  faces  whereupon 
The  fitful  firelight  paled  and  shone. 

Clearly,  whatever  we  think  of  my  version  of 
this  passage,  the  original  is  better.  The  metre 
needs  rime.  The  addition  of  rime  is  a  net  gain 
to  the  extent  of  rime's  whole  value,  both  decora- 
tive and  structural.  Of  decasyllabic  verse  this 
cannot  be  said,  for  the  structural  function  of 
the  rime  restricts  the  freedom  of  the  rhythm; 
but  in  octosyllabics  there  is  no  such  freedom  to 
be  restricted.  Rimeless  octosyllabics  hardly 
admit  greater  variety  than  can  be  practiced 
with  rime,  for  the  sing-song  tendency  of  the 
metrical  scheme  is  sufficient  to  hold  its  own,  with 
the  help  of  rime,  against  any  ordinary  degree  of 


Miscellaneous  Metres  99 

license  in  the  rhythmical  periods.  Moreover, 
rime  is  actually  needed  to  differentiate  the 
lines.  My  version  of  Whittier's  lines  may  be 
fairly  agreeable  in  itself,  but  if  it  were  pro- 
tracted over  several  pages  it  would  become  very 
wearisome. 

The  same  need  of  rime  is  found  in  all  the 
shorter  metres,  and  also  in  the  longer  ones,  since 
the  latter  either  tend  to  split  up  into  short 
ones  or  else  by  their  length  lose  distinctness  of 
form.  In  either  case  they  may  be  agreeable 
without  rime,  but  they  are  pretty  certain  to  be 
more  so  with  it.  Some  poets  have  attempted 
rimeless  lines  of  unequal  lengths,  finding  in  the 
very  formlessness  of  their  verse  a  romantic 
gratification.  One  of  Henley's  experiments  will 
serve  for  the  type. 

Once  on  a  time 

There  was  a  little  boy:  a  master-mage 

By  virtue  of  a  Book 

Of  magic — O,  so  magical  it  filled 

His  life  with  visionary  pomps 

Processional !    And  Powers 

Passed  with  him  where  he  passed.    And  Thrones 

And  Dominations,  glaived  and  plumed  and  mailed, 

Thronged  in  the  criss-cross  streets,    .    .    . 


ioo  English  Verse 

Verse  of  this  kind  has  been  so  favored  in  the 
last  decade  or  two  that  one  who  condemns  it 
must  speak  with  some  diffidence;  but  I  myself 
can  see  little  value  in  it.  There  is  no  pleasure 
in  the  successive  gratification  and  disappoint- 
ment of  the  reader's  expectation,  for  the  reader 
is  not  encouraged  to  form  any  expectations 
whatever;  there  is  no  conflict  between  the 
rhythm  and  the  metrical  scheme,  for  there  is  no 
metrical  scheme.  Mr.  Henley  wanted  to  revel 
in  artistic  freedom  from  restraint ;  but  he  for- 
got that  unless  the  restraint  is  visible  in  the 
background  the  freedom  will  hardly  be  recogniz- 
able as  such,  and  therefore  will  not  be  artistic- 
ally effective.  Milton  might  just  as  well  have 
printed  Satan's  speech  in  this  way : 

Is  this  the  region,  this  the  soil,  the  clime, — 

Said  then  the  lost  archangel, — 

Is  this  the  seat  that  we  must  change 

For  heaven?  this  mournful  gloom  for  that 

Celestial  light? 

The  fact  is  that  within  the  limits  of  a  fixed 
form  there  is  ample  scope  for  freedom,  and  to 
reject  form  altogether  generally  suggests  artis- 
tic decadence  rather  than  strength. 


Miscellaneous  Metres          101 

Thus  far  I  have  mentioned  no  metres  except 
those  commonly  called  iambic, — those,  namely, 
whose  scheme  demands  regular  successions  of 
stressed  and  unstressed  syllables,  beginning 
with  the  latter  and  ending  with  the  former. 
Partly  opposite  in  theory,  and  differing  in  effect 
to  a  remarkable  degree,  are  the  metres  called 
trochaic.  The  most  familiar  example  is  per- 
haps Longfellow's  Hiawatha. 

And  the  smoke  rose  slowly,  slowly, 

Through  the  tranquil  air  of  morning, 

First  a  single  line  of  darkness, 

Then  a  denser,  bluer  vapor, 

Then  a  snow-white  cloud  unfolding, 

Like  the  tree-tops  of  the  forest, 

Ever  rising,  rising,  rising, 

Till  it  touched  the  top  of  heaven, 

Till  it  broke  against  the  heaven, 

And  rolled  outward  all  around  it. 

Trochaic  metres  are  not  in  high  favor  in 
English.  Everyone  feels  their  inferiority,  and 
they  are  seldom  used  in  compositions  of  length 
and  dignity. 

This  fact  is  commonly  explained  as  follows. 
In  trochaic  metres  it  is  thought  that  we  in  our , 
minds   commonly   associate  each  light  syllable 


IO2  English  Verse 

with  the  stressed  syllable  immediately  preceding, 
while  in  iambics  each  light  syllable  is  associated 
with  the  one  following ;  in  other  words,  trochaic 
metres  are  regarded  as  made  up  of  trochees  and 
iambic  metres  as  made  of  iambi.  Now  in  Eng- 
lish most  disyllabic  words  are  accented  on  the 
first  syllable.  Consequently,  when  such  words 
occur  in  trochaic  verse,  the  tendency  of  the 
rhythm  is  commonly  to  bind  their  two  syllables 
together  and  to  separate  them  from  the  context ; 
while  in  iambic  metres  the  tendency  is  to  bind 
such  words  to  the  context  as  intimately  as  their 
two  syllables  are  bound  together.  The  result- 
ing fluency  is  thought  to  account  for  the 
smoother  charm  of  iambics  as  opposed  to  the 
_jchoppiness  of  trochaics.  The  difference  may  be 
clearly  shown  by  making  the  necessary  changes 
in  the  passage  quoted. 

And  slowly,  slowly,  rose  the  smoke, 

Through  morning's  still  and  tranquil  air, 

A  single  line  of  darkness  first, 

A  denser,  bluer  vapor  next, 

And  then  a  snow-white  opening  cloud. 

Certainly  this  rhythm  is  more  agreeable  to 
our  ears  than  the  trochaic ;  the  latter  does,  after 


Miscellaneous  Metres          103 

a  time,  become  exasperating ;  and  the  foregoing 
explanation  seems  plausible.  I  myself  have 
given  it  elsewhere  as  the  true  one,  but  I  am  now 
inclined  to  doubt  its  soundness.  One  reason  for 
my  doubt  is  that,  if  the  explanation  were  cor- 
rect, iambic  verses  ought  to  be  similarly  choppy 
and  unpleasing  when  their  disyllabic  words 
happen  to  be  oxytones;  but  I  cannot  discover 
that  they  are.  Such  a  line  as  Milton's 

Restore  us  and  regain  the  blissful  seat 
seems  to  me  as  fluent  as  the  line  which  follows  it : 


Sing,;  heavenly  Musej  that  on 


the  secret  top. 


In  the  following  passage  I  have  deliberately  put 
together  as  many  oxytones  as  I  conveniently 
could,  and  excluded  paroxytones  altogether, — 
regardless  of  course,  of  sense,  and  with  the  sole 
purpose  of  trying  a  metrical  experiment. 

Each  star  that  shines  aloft  in  the  blue  vault, 
Aloof,  remote,  by  blank  bare  deeps  disjoined 
From  its  compeers,  throbs  yet  in  full  accord 
With  their  sweet  hymn  of  praise, — if  we  concede, 
As  bards  assure  us,  that  the  stars  do  sing. 
So  when  a  shy  recluse  forswears  the  world, 
Secludes  himself  in  some  far-oif  retreat, 


104  English  Verse 

Assumes  strange  clothes,  and  then  repeats  long  prayers, 
Does  he  suppose  himself  quite  set  apart 
From  all  mankind?    As  well  might  man  presume 
To  make  repeal  of  God's  divine  decrees. 

Without  pretending  that  this  verse  has  any 
merit  whatever,  I  venture  to  affirm  that  it  suf- 
fers very  little  from  the  cause  in  question.  To 
my  ear,  the  fact  that  the  passage  contains  24< 
oxytones  and  no  paroxytones  may,  perhaps, 
give  it  some  stiffness  of  cadence  which  might 
better  be  varied;  but  I  can  detect  no  effect 
even  remotely  resembling  the  choppiness  of 
Hiawatha. 

I  am  therefore  inclined  to  ascribe  our  low 
estimate  of  trochaic  metres  not  to  any  peculiar- 
ity of  our  language,  but  to  an  innate  dislike  for 
the  trochaic  rhythm  itself.  I  think  the  rhythm 
of  "Hollow,  hollow,  hollow,  hollow"  is  intrinsic- 
ally less  agreeable  to  our  senses  than  the  rhythm 
of  "Hello!  hello!  hello!  hello!"  and  the  reason 
why  it  is  less  agreeable  seems  to  be  that  it  is  less 
easy.  In  the  latter  rhythm,  a  low  tone  leads  up 
gradually  to  a  full  stress,  while  in  the  other 
there  is  a  sudden  initial  explosion,  conveying  a 
sense  of  effort  and  difficulty.  As  we  saw  in  the 


Miscellaneous  Metres          105 

first  chapter,  our  whole  instinct  for  rhythm  is 
based  on  a  principle  of  economy;  and  it  is 
natural  that  those  rhythms  should  please  us 
best  in  which  there  seems  to  be  least  effort. 
Metre  is  the  natural  rhythm  of  speech  subjected 
to  certain  restraints ;  but  in  trochaic  metres  the 
rhythm  that  is  put  under  restraint  has  just  a 
touch  of  the  unnatural  and  odd. 

Trochaic  metres  are  generally  relegated  to  a 
subordinate  place.  There  are  a  few  charming 
lyrics,  but  the  slight  unnaturalness  and  oddity 
of  their  rhythm  is  noticeable, — being  indeed  a 
part  of  their  charm.  Even  Hiawatha  is,  I 
think,  delightful,  just  because  its  metre  gives  it 
the  right  touch  of  primitive  outlandishness ;  but 
I  confess  I  cannot  enjoy  very  much  of  it  at  a 
time.  Browning's  One  Word  More  is  rhyth- 
mically grotesque;  but  the  careful  reader  of 
that  poem  will  find  in  its  curious  train  of 
thought  some  justification  for  its  grotesque 
form.  In  general,  however,  we  cannot  condemn 
the  instinct  which  has  led  poets  to  prefer  iambic 
verse  for  sustained  and  dignified  composition. 

Where  the  trochaic  rhythm  is  used,  it  is  very 


106  English  Verse 

often  used  in  an  impure  form, — the  verse  both 
beginning  and  ending  with  stressed  syllables. 
Thus  in  Tennyson's  Locksley  Hall  we  have 

Comrades,  leave  me  here  a  little,  while  as  yet  'tis  early 
morn. 

In  such  a  poem  we  sometimes  hardly  know 
whether  the  rhythm  is  iambic  or  trochaic.  If 
the  mid-line  break  comes  after  a  stressed  syl- 
lable, as  in 

Love  took  up  the  harp  of  life,  and  smote  on  all  the  chords 
with  might, 

the  verse  seems  to  acquire  a  decidedly  iambic 
run.  Such  metres  are  in  fact  compromises, 
and  they  partly  succeed  in  combining  the  odd 
charm  of  the  trochaic  rhythm  with  the  natural 
ease  of  the  iambic. 

As  a  further  reason  for  the  inferior  standing 
of  trochaic  metres,  it  should  be  observed  that 
they  do  not  admit  as  much  variety  as  iambic 
metres.  Inversions  are  rare,  partly  because 
they  are  harder  to  manage.  We  saw  in  the 
second  chapter  that  they  are  easy  at  the  begin- 
ning of  a  line  in  iambics,  but  less  natural  else- 
where ;  and  the  reason  was  that  in  the  middle  of 


Miscellaneous  Metres          107 

a  line  they  bring  together  two  stressed  syllables. 
They  obviously  must  have  this  effect  in  trochaic 
metres  even  at  the  beginning  of  a  line.  In 
Locksley  Hall  we  encounter  no  inversions  of  any 
sort  until  we  reach  the  26th  verse.  Hence,  of 
course,  the  persistent  monotony  of  the  metre. 

Moreover,  trochaic  metres  do  not  admit  much 
freedom  of  conflict  between  the  periods  and  the 
scheme  of  the  line-structure.  Browning,  for 
example,  in  One  Word  More  has  made  no  at- 
tempt to  introduce  such  a  conflict,  though  the 
poem  is  in  rimeless  five-stress  verse,  and  though 
in  his  iambic  blank  verse  Browning  has  shown 
himself  a  master.  In  the  following  passage,  for 
instance,  the  line-structure  is  undisturbed. 

Wherefore?     Heaven's  gift  takes  earth's  abatement! 
He  who  smites  the  rock  and  spreads  the  water, 
Bidding  drink  and  live  a  crowd  beneath  him, 
Even  he,  the  minute  makes  immortal, 
Proves,  perchance,  but  mortal  in  the  minute. 

This  monotonous  treatment  seems  so  inevitable 
that  no  other,  so  far  as  I  remember,  has  ever 
been  extensively  tried.     In  the  four-stress  verse 
of  Hiawatha  the  same  monotony  is  found. 
The  reason  for  these  facts  is  not  obvious  at 


io8  English  Verse 

first  sight.  Why  could  not  an  agreeable 
trochaic  blank  verse  be  written  in  some  such 
manner  as  the  following? 

And  the  smoke  rose  slowly  through  the  tranquil 

Air  of  morning,  first  a  line  of  darkness, 

Rising  single,  then  a  vapor  growing 

Ever  denser,  denser,  then  unfolding 

In  a  snow-white  fleecy  cloud,  like  tree-tops 

In  the  forest,  till  it  touched  high  heaven. 

I  think  the  reason  may  be  that,  with  our  innate 
preference  for  iambic  rhythms,  we  find  ourselves 
in  such  verse  as  this  unconsciously  going  over  to 
the  iambic  scheme;  we  refuse  to  carry  the 
trochaic  scheme  in  our  heads  unless  it  is  forcibly 
brought  to  our  attention  at  the  end  of  each  line. 
We  find  ourselves  trying  to  make  out  of  it  some- 
thing like  this : 

The  smoke  rose  slowly  through  the  tranquil  air 
Of  morning,  first  a  line  of  darkness,  rising  single,  then 
A  vapor  growing  ever  denser,  denser,  then 
Unfolding  in  a  snow-white  fleecy  cloud. 

We  fail  to  accept  the  trochaic  scheme,  and  the 
iambic  scheme  fails  to  work;  and  consequently 
we  remain  baffled  and  bewildered. 

This  consideration  reveals,  I  think,  another 


Miscellaneous  Metres          109 

reason  for  the  infrequency  of  inversions  in  tro- 
chaics.  The  metre  must  be  kept  fairly  regular 
and  pure,  or  its  real  character  will  not  be  ap- 
parent. Iambic  verse  can  be  treated  with 
much  license,  as  we  have  seen,  for  our  strong 
leaning  to  the  iambic  rhythm  enables  us  still  to 
feel  its  fundamental  unity ;  but  trochaic  metres 
must  be  monotonously  uniform,  for  unless  the 
rhythm  of  the  words  follows  pretty  closely  the 
ideal  scheme  the  latter  becomes  hopelessly  sub- 
merged. 

There  still  remain  for  consideration  several 
classes  of  metres  in  which  stressed  and  un- 
stressed syllables  do  not  regularly  alternate. 

In  the  metre  of  Byron's  lyric 

/  /  (  ' 

The  Assyrian  came  down  like  the  wolf  on  the  fold 

there  are  regularly  two  light  syllables  for  each 
strong  stress.  Every  "foot"  is  an  anapaest. 
This  galloping  verse,  however,  is  generally  made 
more  agreeable  by  frequent  omissions  of  a  light 
syllable, — in  common  parlance,  by  substitution 
of  iambi  for  anapaests.  So  in  The  Burial  of  Sir 
John  Moore ; 


1 1  o  English  Verse 

Not  a  drum  was  heard,  not  a  funeral  note, 
As  his  corpse  to  the  rampart  we  hurried; 

Not  a  soldier  discharged  his  farewell  shot 
O'er  the  grave  where  our  hero  we  buried. 

In  the  third  line  of  the  stanza  there  are  only  ten 
syllables,  instead  of  twelve,  for  the  four  stresses ; 
but  of  course  the  rhythmic  intervals  are  felt  to 
be  equivalent.  We  read  the  line  almost  as 
slowly  as  we  should  if  it  were  "Not  a  soldier  dis- 
charging his  f  are-thee-well  shot" ;  but  we  have 
to  eke  out  the  rhythm  by  slight  prolongations  of 
certain  syllables,  or  by  slight  pauses.  In  the 
first  line  of  the  extract  most  readers  will 
lengthen  the  word  drum  and  also  make  a  slight 
pause  after  it,  so  that  the  intervals  are  as  long 
as  they  would  be  with  the  word  trumpet  sub- 
stituted. 

The  intervals  in  this  rhythm  are  of  course  ap- 
proximately equal  to  one  another,  but  the  reader 
will  readily  perceive  that  they  are  longer 
(normally)  than  the  intervals  in  iambic  verse. 
In  the  iambic  line 

The  soldier  fired  his  farewell  shot 
I  think  few  would  pronounce  the  last  two  words 


Miscellaneous  Metres          1 1 1 

quite  as  deliberately  as  in  the  stanza  quoted 
above.  The  tempo  of  all  verse  varies  capri- 
ciously, as  we  saw  in  the  first  chapter ;  but  the 
average  tempo  of  the  verse  now  under  considera- 
tion is  slower  than  the  average  tempo  of  iambic 
verse.  On  the  other  hand,  we  ordinarily  pro- 
nounce the  actual  syllables  in  these  slow  rhythms 
somewhat  more  rapidly  than  in  iambics.  That 
is  to  say,  we  allow  less  time,  on  the  average,  for 
each  syllable ;  but,  as  there  are  many  more  syl- 
lables to  be  pronounced,  we  allow  somewhat  more 
time  for  the  average  interval.  Thus  it  would 
be  quite  correct  to  describe  these  metres  either 
as  slower  or  as  faster  than  iambics,  according 
as  we  think  of  the  rhythmical  scheme  or  of  the 
language.  Upon  these  seemingly  trivial  facts 
rest  most  of  the  principles  that  apply  peculiarly 
to  this  kind  of  verse. 

The  first  thing  to  be  noted  is  that  these  freer 
metres  admit  less  variety  in  the  strength  of  the 
stresses.  Observe  that  in  the  whole  first  stanza 
of  Shelley's  poem,  The  Cloud,  there  is  not  one  of 
those  so-called  "conventional  stresses"  that  we 
found  so  common  in  iambic  verse. 


112  English  Verse 

• 

I  bring  fresh  showers  for  the  thirsting  flowers, 

From  the  seas  and  the  streams; 
I  bear  light  shade  for  the  leaves  when  laid 

In  their  noon-day  dreams.  f 

From  my  wings  are  shaken,  the  dews  that  waken 

The  sweet  buds  every  one,  .  / 

When  rocked,  to  rest  pn  their  ^mother's  breast, 

As  she  dances  about  the  sun. 
I  wield  the  flail  of  the,  lashing  hail. 

And  whiten  the  green  plains  under, 
And  then  again  I  dissolve  it  in  rain, 

And  laugh  as  I  pass  in  thunder. 

In  the  whole  poem  of  84<  lines  there  are,  indeed, 
only  two  or  three  weak  stresses.  The  most  un- 
mistakeable  one  occurs  in  this  passage : 

I  am  the  daughter  of  earth  and  water, 
And  the  nursling  of  the  sky. 

The  chief  reason  why  such  stresses  are  rare  is 
found  in  the  length  of  the  rhythmic  interval. 
As  the  beats  are  farther  apart  they  need  to  be 
stronger ;  it  is  not  quite  satisfactory  merely  to 
imagine  them,  as  we  so  often  do  in  iambics.  In 
Pope's  line 

The  proper  study  of  mankind  is  man 

one  hardly  stresses  the  word  "of"  at  all ;  as  was 
explained  in  the  second  chapter,  it  need  only  be 


Miscellaneous  Metres          1 1  3 

pronounced  at  the  proper  time ;  but  in  the  last 
line  quoted  from  The  Cloud  I  find  myself  giving 
a  perceptible  stress  to  the  same  little  word,  be- 
cause the  general  rhythm  of  the  poem  has  made 
such  a  stress  imperative.  Moreover,  as  the 
double  interval  between  "nurs — "  and  "sky"  is 
considerably  longer  than  the  corresponding  in- 
terval in  Pope's  line,  it  is  easier  to  eke  it  out 
with  an  unnatural  stress  than  to  give  a  slow  and 
measured  utterance  to  unimportant  words  with- 
out stressing  them. 

In  other  poems,  such  as  The  Sensitive  Plant, 
Shelley  allows  himself  somewhat  more  freedom, 
and  occasionally  a  line  with  a  weak  stress  may 
be  very  beautiful;  but  even  in  The  Sensitive 
Plant  weak  stresses  are  exceptional  and  rare, 
and  most  skilful  poets  favor  them  even  less  than 
Shelley  did.  There  is  a  minor  reason  for  avoid- 
ing them  in  the  fact  that  they  sometimes  are 
misleading;  for  where  the  number  of  syllables 
varies  capriciously  the  reader  needs  a  strong 
word  to  catch  his  eye  and  signal  the  proper 
place  for  the  rhythmical  beat.  Verses  ought 
of  course  to  read  themselves;  and  everyone 


H4  English  Verse 

knows  how  vexatious  they  are  when  they  do 
not. 

Finally,  there  is  still  a  third  minor  reason  for 
the  rarity  of  weak  stresses.  It  is  found  in  the 
accentual  character  of  our  language,  and  the 
rhythmic  instinct  explained  in  the  first  chapter. 
There  is  little  likelihood,  in  ordinary  composi- 
tion, of  one's  putting  together  five  syllables  that 
are  incapable  of  receiving  a  natural  speech- 
stress.  In  iambic  verse  only  three  weak  syl- 
lables need  come  together  to  necessitate  a  weak 
stress.  There  are,  indeed,  only  three  in  the 
particular  anapaestic  line  last  quoted  from 
Shelley;  but  it  is  obvious  that  such  com- 
binations are  easily  avoidable  in  anapaestic 
verse. 

The  strengthened  beat  upon  the  stressed  syl- 
lables seems  to  fortify  the  scheme  of  the  line- 
structure,  and  so  prevent  much  freedom  of 
conflict  on  the  part  of  the  rhythmical  periods. 
This  is  especially  true,  of  course,  of  rimed 
verse.  There  is  so  much  emphasis  on  the  rime 
that  a  rhythmical  period  broken  between  two 
lines  has  almost  the  same  effect  as  a  broken 


Miscellaneous  Metres          1 1 5 

phrase  in  iambic  verse.  Browning  writes,  in 
Saul: 

Then  fancies  grew  rife 
Which  had  come  long  ago  on  the  pasture,  when  round  me 

the  sheep 
Fed  in  silence — above,  the  one  eagle  wheeled  slow  as  in 

sleep ; 
And  I  lay  in  my  hollow  and  mused  on  the  world  that 

might  lie 
'Neath  his  ken,  though  I  saw  but  the  strip  'twixt  the  hill 

and  the  sky. 

These  lines  show  a  praiseworthy  struggle  for 
freedom  and  variety ;  but  is  the  struggle  worth 
while?  The  words  "when  round  me  the  sheep 
fed  in  silence"  protest  vehemently  against  dis- 
junction; and  so  do  the  words  "the  world  that 
might  lie  'neath  his  ken."  In  iambic  verse  this 
phrasing  would  be  unobjectionable.  Compare 

And  fancies  then  grew  rife 

Which  came  long  since,  when  in  the  fields  the  sheep 
Fed  silently. 

If  rime  were  not  present  this  breaking  of  the 
periods  would  seem  less  violent,  but  it  would  still 
not  be  pleasant ;  and  this,  of  course,  is  one  rea- 
son why  these  metres  are  generally  used  with 


1 1 6  English  Verse 

rime.  Most  of  them  need  rime,  just  as  short 
iambic  metres  do,  because  they  are  not  easily 
susceptible  of  that  peculiar  treatment  which 
makes  blank  verse  better  than  heroic  verse. 

Such  are  the  principal  effects  of  the  slowness 
of  these  rhythms.  The  quickness  of  their  syl- 
labic movement,  on  the  other  hand,  necessitates 
a  peculiar  delicacy  of  diction.  This,  however, 
is  a  matter  of  practical  technique  rather  than 
of  theory.  I  need  only  point  out  that  the 
charm  of  these  metres  depends  largely  upon  the 
kind  of  syllables  chosen  to  fill  the  unstressed 
places  in  the  rhythm.  These  syllables  may  be 
long  and  heavy,  or  they  may  be  short  and  light ; 
but  unless  they  accord  in  character  with  the 
stressed  syllables,  with  the  rhetorical  emphasis 
of  the  sentences,  and  with  the  feeling  expressed, 
the  total  effect  cannot  be  harmonious.  To  il- 
lustrate the  extremes  of  art  one  may  well  com- 
pare the  passage  already  given  from  The  Cloud 
with  the  following  stanza  from  Browning's  Abt 
Vogler,  in  which  one  of  the  most  beautiful  con- 
ceptions of  a  great  poet  is  marred  by  almost 
every  possible  awkwardness  of  versification. 


Miscellaneous  Metres          117 

All  we  have  willed  or  hoped  or  dreamed  of  good  shall 

exist; 
Not  its  semblance,  but  itself;  no  beauty,  nor  good,  nor 

power 
Whose  voice  has  gone  forth,  but  each  survives  for  the 

melodist 

When  eternity  affirms  the  conception  of  an  hour. 
The  high  that"  proved  too  high,  the  heroic  for  earth  too 

hard, 

The  passion  that  left  the  ground  to  lose  itself  in  the  sky, 
Are  music  sent  up  to  God  by  the  lover  and  the  bard; 
Enough  that  he  heard  it  once;  we  shall  hear  it  by 
and  by. 

Because  of  their  rapid  syllabic  movement  and 
the  slow  strong  beat  of  their  rhythm  these 
metres  are  ill-adapted  to  the  expression  of  in- 
tricate feeling  or  close  thought.  Like  some  of 
the  more  sing-song  iambic  metres,  they  are 
lyrical  in  their  essential  character.  So  much 
of  our  attention  is  monopolized  by  the  tune,  as 
we  read  them,  that  we  have  none  to  spare  for  the 
unraveling  of  tangled  meanings.  Such  a  poem 
as  Browning's  Saul,  in  which  the  expression  is 
often  obscure  and  difficult,  is  made  still  more 
difficult  by  the  distraction  of  its  galloping 
rhythm ;  the  obscurities  are  thereby  made  worse 
than  difficult,  they  are  made  exasperating ;  and 
the  only  way  to  read  the  poem  intelligently  is 


1 1 8  English  Verse 

to  forget  the  rhythm  and  try  to  read  it  as  if  it 
were  prose.  No  one  can  fully  appreciate  at  the  ^ 
same  time  both  the  rhythm  and  the  sense  of 
Saul;  we  either  relish  the  verse  with  only  a 
vague  sense  of  the  meaning,  or  else  become  ab- 
sorbed in  the  meaning  with  only  a  vague  sense  of 
the  verse. 

A  similar  effect  is  produced  by  much  of 
Swinburne's  poetry;  for  though  Swinburne  is 
the  greatest  living  master  of  these  forms  of 
verse,  he  has  achieved  his  mastery  largely  by 
sacrificing  clearness  and  precision  of  style  to 
sensuous  charm  of  sound.  It  is  safe  to  predict 
that  any  one  who  reads  the  opening  lines  of 
Hesperia  for  the  first  time  will  find  them  rhyth- 
mically charming,  but  will  have  little  more  un- 
derstanding of  them  than  of  the  beautiful 

nonsense  verses  of  Lear  or  Lewis  Carroll. 

/  /       w  v    /    y  ^ 

Out  of  the  golden  remote  wild  west  where  the  sea  without 

shore  is, 
Full  of  the  sunset,  and  sad,  if  at  all,  with  the  fulness  of 

joy, 

As  a  wind  sets  in  with  the  autumn  that  blows  from  the 

region  of  stories, 

Blows  with  a  perfume  of  songs  and  of  memories  be- 
loved from  a  boy, 


Miscellaneous  Metres          119 

Blows  from  the  capes  of  the  past  oversea  to  the  bays  of 

the  present, 

Filled  as  with  shadow  of  sound  with  the  pulse  of  in- 
visible feet, 
Far  out  to  the  shallows  and  straits  of  the  future,  by  rough 

ways  or  pleasant, 

Is  it  thither  the  wind's  wings  beat?    Is  it  hither  to  me, 
O  my  sweet? 

Many  other  kinds  of  verse  are  familiar  to 
English  readers,  but  they  differ  from  those 
already  considered  only  in  the  manner  of  apply- 
ing the  same  fundamental  principles.  Some- 
times more  than  two  light  syllables  occur 
between  stresses.  In  Swinburne's  Super  Flu- 
mina  Babylonis  there  are  in  one  part  of  the 
verse  four  successive  unstressed  syllables. 

By  the  wdters  of  Bdbylon  we  sat  d6wn  and  wept, 

Remembering  thee, 
That  for  dges  of  agony  hast  endured  and  s!6pt; 

and  the  experiment  is  as  beautiful  as  it  is  in- 
teresting. Jean  Ingelow,  in  a  lyric  beginning 
"Like  a  laverock  in  the  lift,"  frequently  puts  no 
light  syllable  at  all  between  the  stresses : 

When  the  darker  days  come,  and  no  sun  will  shine, 
Thou  shalt  dry  my  tears,  lass,  and  I'll  dry  thine. 
It's  we  two,  it's  we  two,  while  the  world's  away, 
Sitting  by  the  golden  sheaves  on  our  wedding  day. 


120  English  Verse 

And,  finally,  Rudyard  Kipling,  in  The  Last 
Chantey,  occasionally  even  omits  a  stressed  syl- 
lable and  actually  lets  the  beat  of  the  rhythm 
fall  upon  nothing  at  all  but  a  pause. 

Sun,  wind,  and  cloud  '  shall  fail  not  from  the  f dee  of  it, 
Stinging,  ringing  spindrift,  nor  the  fulmar  flying  free; 

And  the  ships  shall  go  abroad 

To  the  glory  of  the  Lord 

Who  heard  the  silly  sailor-folk  and  gave  them  back  their 
sea. 

Such  effects  as  these  are  often  very  pleasing 
indeed,  but  it  is  evident  that  their  availability  is 
restricted.  They  need  no  extended  analysis,  for 
they  are  self-explanatory. 

All  the  metres  considered  in  this  chapter  are 
susceptible  of  scansion  by  feet,  like  that  dis- 
cussed in  Chapter  II;  but  here,  as  there,  it 
seems  idle  to  insist  upon  any  defined  system. 
Such  verse  as  that  of  Swinburne's  Hesperia  may 
be  called  either  dactylic  or  anapaestic,  and  may 
be  divided  in  either  of  these  two  ways : 

Out  of  the /golden  re /mote  wild/west  where  the/sea  with- 
out /shore  is, 


or 


Miscellaneous  Metres          121 

Out /of  the  gold /en  remote /wild  west/where  the  sea/with- 
out shore /is. 

Our  choice  between  the  two  will  depend  upon 
whether  the  poem  as  a  whole  seems  to  move 
dactylically  or  anapaestically.  The  first  line 
looks  dactylic,  but  the  second  line  might  be 
either,  and  the  last  line  of  my  extract  looks 
very  anapaestic.  Really  the  only  important 
facts  to  notice  are  that  neither  scansion  is  more 
than  a  convenient  mode  of  description,  since 
neither  shows  the  natural  lines  of  cleavage  in 
the  rhythmical  movement,  and  that  though  we 
seem  to  find  in  the  line  given  above  a  great  many 
kinds  of  feet, — anapaests,  dactyls,  trochees, 
iambi,  and  what  not, — yet  the  metre  is  perfectly 
homogeneous,  and  the  differences  in  name  are 
due  largely  to  the  inadequacy  of  the  system. 

Most  metrists  contend  for  some  method  of 
scansion  essentially  like  the  above,  but  a  notable 
departure  from  all  the  old  systems  has  been 
made  by  Mr.  Robert  Bridges.  His  little  book 
on  prosody  seems  to  me  utterly  wrong  in  some 
of  its  fundamental  principles,  but  it  is  never- 
theless a  work  of  high  order,  and  every  student 


122  English  Verse 

of  prosody  owes  much  to  Mr.  Bridges'  taste, 
acumen,  and  learning.  He  recognizes  the 
inadequacy  of  ordinary  scansions,  and  feels  the 
need  of  a  new  system  to  conform  to  actual  facts. 
For  example,  he  aptly  quotes  dough's  dactylic 
hexameter, 

Yea,  and  shall  hodmen  in  beershops  complain  of  a  glory 
denied  them? 

and  points  out  the  absurdity  of  treating  beer- 
shopscompl  as  one  of  its  component  parts.  The 
line,  he  says,  should  be  divided  as  follows: 

Yea  and/shall  hodmen/in  beershops /complain/of  a  glory/ 
denied  them? 

This  seems  almost  to  do  what  the  old- 
fashioned  system  utterly  failed  to  do ;  it  almost 
indicates  the  natural  rhythmic  divisions  of  the 
line.  But  in  order  to  effect  this  result,  and  to 
cover  all  varieties  of  the  metre  he  is  analyzing, 
Mr.  Bridges  has  to  employ  an  appalling  number 
of  feet.  He  enumerates  fifteen  in  all,  ranging 
from  the  simple  iambus  to  the  foot  of  five  syl- 
lables with  a  stress  in  the  middle  (w  ^  -  ^  w) .  He 
has  also  deduced  a  series  of  laws,  which  declare 


Miscellaneous  Metres          123 

when  and  how  the  various  feet  are  used,  and 
what  kinds  of  words  and  syllables  are  proper 
to  them. 

Great  ingenuity  and  patience  were  requisite 
for  such  a  task  as  Mr.  Bridges  set  himself,  and 
he  has  performed  it  in  a  remarkable  manner. 
By  his  system  it  seems  possible  to  divide  almost 
any  line  of  good  verse  into  feet  which  shall  be 
more  real  than  the  feet  of  the  old  system,  just 
as  inbeershops  is  more  real  than  beershopscompl. 
If,  therefore,  we  entertain  the  notion  that  feet 
of  some  kind  are  the  real  components  of  verse, 
and  that  their  identity  and  character  must  at 
any  cost  be  discovered  and  expounded,  I  think 
we  might  find  in  Mr.  Bridges'  system  something 
very  near  to  our  desideratum.  If,  on  the  other 
hand,  we  look  upon  scansion  as  a  mere  conveni- 
ence, we  must  remain  sceptical  as  to  whether 
this  system  is  really  an  improvement  upon  the 
old  one.  It  is  so  intricate  as  to  be  hardly  useful 
at  all ;  it  is  merely  highly  interesting. 

That  the  system  is  not  a  scientific  or  philo- 
sophical exposition  of  the  real  nature  of  verse, — 
that  it  is  not  anything  more  than  a  convenience, 


124  English  Verse 

— becomes  curiously  evident  when  it  appears 
that  many  excellent  lines  of  verse  are  not  covered 
by  it.  Certain  lines  by  Shelley  and  Coleridge 
prove  baffling  to  the  system.  Mr.  Bridges  says 
that  those  poets  "had  not  a  consistent  practice" ; 
and  he  adds  this  significant  confession, — which 
seems  to  me  a  complete  self -betrayal :  "A  con- 
sistent prosody  is,  however,  so  insignificant  a 
part  in  what  makes  good  English  poetry  that  I 
find  that  I  do  not  myself  care  very  much  whether 
some  good  poetry  be  consistent  in  its  versifica- 
tion or  not ;  indeed  I  think  I  have  liked  some 
verses  better  because  they  do  not  scan,  and  thus 
displease  pedants.  .  .  .  However,  when  one  is 
considering  prosody  and  principles  of  rhythm, 
it  is  necessary  to  attend  to  that  only;  and  I 
cannot  admit  that  these  verses  are  good  as  mere 
versification." 


CHAPTER  VI 
BmbelU0bment0  of  \Derse 

RIME  is  not  merely  an  embellishment  of  verse, 
for  it  has  its  structural  as  well  as  its  decorative 
function;  but  it  behooves  us  to  examine  sepa- 
rately the  laws  that  govern  it  as  an  embellish- 
ment. Such  an  examination,  it  is  true,  will  be 
like  that  into  the  snakes  of  Ireland,  for  the  em- 
ployment of  rime  is  governed  not  by  laws  but  by 
irresponsible  and  indisputable  taste ;  but  there  is 
so  much  confusion  of  opinion  on  the  subject,  and 
there  has  been  so  much  futile  wrangling  about 
it,  that  it  will  be  worth  while  at  least  to  clear 
the  ground. 

It  is  usual  to  state  the  laws  of  rime  somewhat 
as  follows.  First,  the  last  accented  vowels  of  the 
riming  words  must  sound  alike ;  thus  dough  and 
so,  or  beaver  and  weaver,  or  die  and  pacify  may 
rime,  but  not  though  and  do,  or  believer  and 

endeavor.     Second,  the  consonants  before  the 

125 


126  English  Verse 

accented  vowels  must  not  sound  alike;  thus 
dough  and  doe,  or  conception  and  deception, 
make  what  is  called  an  identical  rime,  and  fail 
to  satisfy  the  ear.  Third,  all  the  sounds  after 
the  accented  vowels  must  sound  alike ;  thus  thorn 
and  dawn,  or  singer  and  finger,  or  idiom  and 
quotidian,  do  not  rime. 

Everyone  understands  these  laws,  but  I  think 
only  amateur  metrists  regard  them  all  as  uni- 
versally binding.  The  first  law,  most  notori- 
ously, is  violated  by  every  modern  English  poet. 
In  Shelley's  Adonais,  a  poem  of  55  Spenserian 
stanzas,  there  are  49  violations ;  in  almost  every 
stanza  we  find  some  such  rime  as  love,  move,  or 
song,  strung,  or  blot,  thought.  In  the  most  be- 
loved of  the  short  lyrics  in  Tennyson's  Maud 
("Come  into  the  garden, — ")  we  have  moves, 
loves;  tune,  moon;  one,  alone,  gone;  and  blood, 
stood.  Rimes  of  this  sort  have  partly  been 
foisted  into  our  system  of  verse  by  changes  in 
pronunciation;  for  though  words  that  were 
formerly  sounded  alike  may  have  become  dif- 
ferentiated in  speech,  their  familiar  use  by  old 
poets  sometimes  induces  us  still  to  accept  them  as 


Embellishments  of  Verse       1 27 

making  rimes.  Just  how  far  modern  practice  is 
due  to  this  cause  it  is  impossible  to  say.  With 
the  French,  the  changes  wrought  by  time  have 
affected  verse  in  an  opposite  manner ;  for  many 
rimes  which  are  perfect  according  to  modern 
pronunciation  are  deemed  inadmissible  in  French 
poetry  because  the  words  were  once  pronounced 
differently.  There  are  evidently  other  causes 
besides  the  historical  one,  but  they  work  ob- 
scurely in  the  instincts  of  our  race,  and  this  is 
not  the  place  to  explore  them.  It  need  only  be 
said  that  no  formula  can  be  given  in  exposition 
of  them ;  the  caprices  of  taste  do  not  lend  them- 
selves to  generalization.  For  example,  my  ear 
is  often  perfectly  satisfied  by  the  riming  of  love, 
move,  and  heaven,  given;  but  it  might  perhaps 
reject  the  pairing  of  wander,  under,  or  brown, 
alone;  yet  I  cannot  say  that  the  latter  pairs  are 
more  unlike  than  the  former. 

The  second  law  of  rime  is  more  nearly  impera- 
tive than  the  first,  but  some  poets  violate  it  with 
freedom.  In  Adonais  there  are  six  identical 
rimes,  such  as  light,  delight;  and  similar  effects 
are  common  in  Rossetti  and  Swinburne.  In 


128  English  Verse 

some  cases  it  would  be  mere  pedantry  to  object 
to  them,  as  when,  for  example,  the  riming  words 
are  found  in  the  second  and  seventh  lines  of  a 
Spenserian  stanza,  or  in  the  first  and  eighth 
lines  of  a  sonnet.  In  either  case  there  are  four 
lines  riming  together,  and  two  of  these  lines 
come  between  the  identical  rimes.  Under  such 
circumstances  it  would  take  either  a  super- 
humanly  retentive  ear  or  else  some  lack  of  can- 
dor to  profess  that  one  is  offended  by  the 
identity.  In  other  cases  tastes  will  inevitably 
differ.  In  heroic  couplets  I  myself  find  identi- 
cal rimes  unsatisfying;  my  ear  feels  cheated, 
for  it  expects  likeness  with  a  difference,  not 
absolute  likeness;  but  even  in  the  matter  of 
heroic  couplets  I  may  not  profess  that  my  taste 
is  better  than  the  taste  of  those  who  disagree. 
One  reason  for  the  difference  in  taste  in  this 
matter,  as  also  in  respect  of  imperfect  rimes, 
is  that  some  of  us  instinctively  attach  more 
relative  importance  to  the  structural,  and 
others  to  the  decorative  value  of  rime.  If  we 
are  listening  only  for  the  echo,  for  its  own  sake, 
we  want  to  be  gratified  in  a  particular  way,  and 


Embellishments  of  Verse        129 

are  somewhat  finical  about  it;  while  if  we  are 
attending  solely  to  the  run  of  the  rhythmical 
periods  and  their  conflict  with  the  line-structure, 
we  tend  to  be  satisfied  with  any  kind  of  rime  that 
is  perceptible.  Other  reasons  for  the  difference 
are  to  be  found  in  mere  habit.  One  who  likes 
identical  rimes  will  be  half  listening  for  them; 
and  one  who  listens  for  them  will  like  them  when 
they  come.  As  between  such  attitudes  and  my 
own,  non  est  disputandum. 

The  third  law  seems  at  first  view  absolutely 
obligatory.  When  Wordsworth  rimes  Hel- 
vellyn  with  dwelling,  or  robin  with  sobbing,  the 
impression  upon  my  ear  is  distinctly  one  of  slip- 
shod vulgarity.  Mrs.  Browning  was  fond  of 
such  imperfect  rimes  as  brother,  lover;  burden, 
disregarding;  suitor,  future;  enter,  venture; 
and  the  like.  She  used  them  not  for  convenience 
but  from  deliberate  choice,  finding  a  gratifica- 
tion in  the  conflict  between  the  actual  and  the 
expected  ideal;  but  to  my  taste  some  of  her 
tenderest  verses  are  thereby  made  hideous.  I 
know  of  no  reason  why  such  rimes  should  ever  be 
justifiable;  yet  if  I  attempted  to  dogmatize 


130  English  Verse 

about  them  I  should  be  stopped  short  by  the  rec- 
ollection of  The  Lady  of  Shalott. 

His  broad  clear  brow  in  sunlight  glowed; 
On  burnished  hooves  his  war-horse  trode; 
From  underneath  his  helmet  flowed 
His  coal-black  curls  as  on  he  rode, 

As  he  rode  down  to  Camelot. 
From  the  bank  and  from  the  river 
He  flashed  into  the  crystal  mirror; 
'Tirra  lirra,'  by  the  river 

Sang  Sir  Launcelot. 

This  stanza  seems  to  me  very  nearly  perfect, 
and  I  should  not  dream  of  objecting  to  the  de- 
fective rime ;  yet  I  have  no  idea  how  to  argue  in 
its  defence,  if  any  one  else  objects  to  it.  Once 
in  a  long  time  I  find  some  other  instance  of  suc- 
cessful violation  of  the  third  law,  or  violation 
that  seems  to  me  successful;  but  in  general  I 
think  the  law  is  very  nearly  a  correct  general- 
ization of  the  taste  of  most  cultivated  persons. , 

I  Next  to  rime,  the  chief  embellishment  of  verse 
is  what  we  call  tone-color.  Tone-color  is  given 
to  verse  by  the  preponderance  of  any  particular 
sound  or  kind  of  sounds,  whether  vowel  or  con- 
sonant. A  preponderance  of  long  a's  or  o's, 


Embellishments  of  Verse       131 

for  instance,  gives  a  color  very  different  from 
that  of  short  e's  and  i's.  "The  long  day  wanes, 
the  slow  moon  climbs"  is  in  one  color ;  Coleridge's 
description  of  the  nightingale's  song,  "with 
skirmish  and  capricious  passagings,"  is  in 
another.  Much  has  been  written  about  the  ef- 
fect and  meaning  of  different  tone-colors,  but  I 
think  the  subject  is  still  enveloped  in  some  un- 
necessary mystery.  We  will  consider  it  only 
with  a  view  to  discovering  fundamental  princi-j 
pies,  so  far  as  they  seem  discoverable. 

A  certain  learned  and  well-known  student  of 
verse  says  that  (for  example)  gutturals  and 
sibilants  express  "amazement,  affright,  indigna- 
tion, contempt,"  and  he  cites  as  an  illustration 
a  passage  from  Paradise  Lost. 

Out  of  my  sight,  thou  serpent;  that  name  best 
Befits  thee  with  him  leagued,  thyself  as  false 
And  hateful;  nothing  wants  but  that  thy  shape 
Like  his  and  color  serpentine  may  show 
Thy  inward  fraud. 

One  objection  to  this  kind  of  doctrine  is  that  it 
makes  people  think  they  have  no  ear  for  verse, 
for  after  careful  reading  they  are  still  uncer- 


132  English  Verse 

tain  whether  they  can  detect  the  effect  described. 
Another  objection  to  it  is  that  it  is  not  true. 
Compare  with  the  lines  quoted  this  little  song 
from  Browning's  Pippa  Passes: 

The  year's  at  the  spring, 
And  day's  at  the  morn; 
Morning's  at  seven; 
The  hill-side's  dew-pearled; 
The  lark's  on  the  wing; 
The  snail's  on  the  thorn; 
God's  in  his  heaven — 
All's  right  with  the  world ! 

This  is  shorter  by  four  syllables  than  the  pas- 
sage from  Milton,  but  it  has  the  same  number  of 
gutturals  and  two  more  sibilants;  yet  fancy 
describing  it  as  an  expression  of  "amazement, 
affright,  indignation,  contempt" ! 

For  another  illustration,  in  one  of  the  stand- 
ard manuals  of  versification  it  is  pointed  out 
that  the  surd  mutes  (p,  k,  t)  "help  to  convey  the 
idea  of  littleness,  delicacy,  and  sprightliness," 
and  that  the  short  vowel  1  is  fitted  to  express 
"joy,  gaiety,  triviality,  rapid  movement,  and 
physical  littleness."  To  illustrate  both  asser- 
tions, Mercutio's  account  of  Queen  Mab  is  cited : 


Embellishments,  of  Verse       133 

She  comes 

In  shape  no  bigger  than  an  agate  stone,    .    .    . 
Drawn  by  a  team  of  little  atomies. 

Here  the  effect  is  perhaps  easier  to  recognize, 
and  even  an  obtuse  reader  thinks  he  follows  the 
reasoning ;  but  compare  Browning's  lines : 

The  wroth  sea's  waves  are  edged 
1     With  foam,  white  as  the  bitten  lip  of  hate. 

The  "bitten  lip"  has  as  many  surd  mutes  and 
short  i's  as  the  "little  atomies" ;  but  it  fails  to 
express  sprightliness,  gaiety,  or  triviality.  An- 
other authority,  to  be  sure,  says  that  the  surd 
mutes  express  "unexpectedness,  vigor,  explosive 
passion,  and  startling  effects  of  all  kinds" ;  but 
even  this  catalogue  of  Dualities  hardly  provides 
for  the  little  atomies./ 

The  fact  is,  of  course,  that  all  this  analysis 
of  sounds  proceeds  upon  a  false  assumption. 
When  you  say  Titan  you  mean  something  big, 
and  when  you  say  tittle  you  mean  something 
small ;  but  it  is  not  the  sound  of  either  word  that 
means  either  bigness  or  littleness,  it  is  the  sense. 
If  you  put  together  a  great  many  similar  con- 
sonants in  one  sentence,  they  will  attract  special 


134  English  Verse 

attention  to  the  words  in  which  they  occur,  and 
the  significance  of  those  words,  whatever  it  may 
be,  is  thereby  intensified ;  but  whether  the  words 
are  "a  team  of  little  atomies"  or  "a  triumphant 
terrible  Titan,"  it  is  not  the  sound  of  the  con- 
sonants that  makes  the  significance.  When 
Tennyson  speaks  of  the  shrill-edged  shriek  of  a 
mother,  his  words  suggest  with  peculiar  vivid- 
ness the  idea  of  a  shriek ;  but  when  you  speak  of 
stars  that  shyly  shimmer,  the  same  sounds  only 
intensify  the  idea  of  shy  shimmering. 

It  is  true  that  many  words, — such  as  whizz, 
bang,  murmur,  moan, — have  been  created  to 
imitate  the  things  they  stand  for;  and  when 
these  words  are  used  in  verse  it  may  plausibly 
be  argued  that  the  sound  alone  conveys  a  certain 
sense.  But  even  here  the  argument  is  no  more 
than  plausible.  "Moan"  does  not  in  fact  ex- 
press the  idea  of  moaning  more  vividly  than 
"mean"  the  idea  of  meanness,  nor  "murmur" 
the  idea  of  murmuring  more  vividly  than  "mar- 
mor"  (to  a  German)  the  idea  of  marble.  There 
are  so  many  imitative  words  still  in  our  language 
that  they  do  affect  its  general  coloring,  and  it 


Embellishments  of  Verse       135 

may  therefore  be  easier,  with  words  full  of  m's 
and  o's  and  n's,  to  express  the  idea  of  moaning 
than  to  express  careless  joyousness,  or  delight 
in  battle,  or  perhaps  any  other  mood ;  but  in  all 
cases  it  is  the  sense  of  the  words  that  actually 
tells.  The  onomatopoetic  origin  of  our  lan- 
guage is  a  matter  of  so  remote  antiquity,  and 
has  been  so  obscured  by  linguistic  changes,  that 
the  student  of  verse  may  neglect  it  in  his  search 
for  fundamental  principles. 

Tone-color  is  most  obvious  in  the  device  of 
alliteration,  and  the  peculiar  effects  of  allitera-  j'l 
tion  are  to  be  explained  partly  by  another 
principle, — the  principle  of  economy.  It  is 
ordinarily  easier  to  utter  the  same  sound  twice 
over  than  to  utter  different  sounds  in  close  suc- 
cession ;  the  vocal  organs  can  with  less  effort  be 
made  to  assume  a  position  recently  abandoned 
than  be  forced  into  a  wholly  new  one.  A  child  a 
year  old  may  say  Papa  and  Mama,  but  must 
wait  many  months  longer  before  he  can  say 
Panama  or  Matapan.  But,  on  the  other  hand, 
if  a  sound  is  a  difficult  one  to  make,  it  may  be 


136  English  Verse 

easier  to  make  it  only  once,  and  follow  it  up 
with  easier  sounds,  than  to  repeat  it  over  and 
over  again.  "Theophilus  Thistlethwaite  thrust 
three  thousand  thistles  through  the  thick  of  his 
thumb"  is  profusely  alliterative,  but  not  easy. 
Thus  it  comes  about  that  alliteration  may  give 
either  pleasure  or  displeasure.  Simple  allitera- 
tive expressions  in  which  the  easier  consonants 
are  duplicated  are  agreeable ;  we  have  developed 
such  an  instinct  for  them  that  they  seem  beauti- 
ful; but  duplications  of  difficult  sounds  are 
likely  not  to  give  effects  of  grace  and  ease,  but 
to  suggest  effort  or  ugliness. 

One  of  the  most  beautiful  specimens  of  grace- 
ful alliteration  is  to  be  found  in  the  first  chorus 
from  Swinburne's  Atalanta. 

When  the  hounds  of  spring  are  on  winter's  traces 

The  mother  of  months,  in  meadow  or  plain, 
Fills  the  shadows  and  windy  places 
With  lisp  of  leaves  and  ripple  of  rain; 
And  the  brown  bright  nightingale  amorous 
Is  half  assuaged  for  Itylus, 
For  the  Thracian  ships  and  the  foreign  faces, 
The  tongueless  vigil,  and  all  the  pain. 

Here  the  effect  of  the  repeated  m's  and  1's  is 
obvious  enough;  but  even  here  we  must  not  at- 


Embellishments  of  Verse       137 

tribute  too  much  importance  to  the  sound.  The 
principle  of  economy  counts  for  much,  but  it 
will  not  prevail  against  the  sense  of  the  words. 
If  instead  of  the  mother  of  months  we  speak  of 
maniacal  madmen,  or  if  instead  of  "lisp  of  leaves 
and  ripple  of  rain"  we  happen  to  be  saying  that 
"the  lurid  lightnings  lit  the  livid  sky,"  we  find 
the  same  alliterations  apparently  producing  a 
very  different  effect. 

The  net  result  seems  to  be  this.  Alliteration 
(like  other  effects  in  tone-color)  makes  a  group 
of  words  peculiarly  prominent  and  effective,  and 
intensifies  the  emotion  suggested  by  their  sense, 
whatever  the  sense  may  be;  but  if  the  sense  is 
delicate  and  graceful  it  is  especially  helped  by 
an  easy  alliteration,  while  if  it  is  strenuous  and  \ 
impetuous  it  is  somewhat  more  intensified  by  an 
uncouth  and  difficult  one.  In  so  far  as  sound- 
effects  are  cultivated  without  reference  to  sense, 
light  alliterations  and  sensuous  colors  are 
sought  after  for  their  own  sakes;  but  these 
sounds  have  no  meaning  of  their  own  apart  from 
the  meanings  of  the  words.  When  a  poet  writes 
a  passage  in  which  one  tone  predominates,  we 


138  English  Verse 

are  not  to  imagine  that  he  has  chosen  that  tone 
with  deliberate  forethought.  The  tone  has 
chosen  itself,  by  its  accidental  presence  in  the 
words  that  were  first  and  uppermost  in  his 
thought ;  and  he  has  merely  taken  pains,  in  the 
arrangement  of  minor  expletives  and  connec- 
tives, to  select  overtones  that  would  accord  with 
and  so  reinforce  the  fundamental  tones. 

I  trust  I  shall  not  seem  insensible  to  the  charm 
of  tone-color  in  verse  when  I  say  that  its  relative 
importance  is  much  overrated  by  the  metrists. 
Tone-color  is  present  in  prose  also,  and  every 
good  prose-writer,  even  every  trained  speaker, 
uses  it  instinctively  to  reinforce  his  meaning 
and  to  promote  euphony.  It  is  unfortunate 
that  so  much  stress  has  been  laid  on  the  tone- 
colors  of  verse  by  writers  and  teachers,  for  peo- 
ple have  conceived  the  notion  that  they 
constitute  one  of  the  great  secrets  of  poetry; 
and  many  persons  neglect  to  cultivate  their 
taste  for  verse  just  because  they  think  it  is  too 
profound  a  thing  for  their  comprehension.  The 
fact  is  that  the  more  elaborate  and  artificial  > 
uses  of  tone-color  are  so  striking  that  any  one  i 


Embellishments  of  Verse       139 

)  can  feel  their  effectiveness;  and  they  are  the 
only  ones  that  are  common  in  poetry  and  not  in 
prose.  The  reader  who  misses  the  subtler  effects 
in  Tennyson  or  Milton  will  also  miss  the  subtler 
effects  in  Jeremy  Taylor  and  John  Bunyan ;  and 
the  supposed  dulness  of  his  ear  should  no  more 
cut  him  off  from  the  enjoyment  of  verse  than  it 
does  from  the  enjoyment  of  prose. 

The  real  greatness  of  English  verse  is  in  its 
rhythm,  and  especially  in  the  conflict  that  arises    ; 
from  the  imposition  upon  the  rhythm  of  metrical 
limitations.     Alliteration,  tone-color,  and  dec- 
orative rime  are  mere  embellishments. 


TNT 

UNIVERSITY 


INDEX 


Alexandrine;  in  Drayton, 
46 ;  in  heroic  verse,  75. 

Alliteration;  135-139. 

Anapaest;  41. 

Anapaestic  verse;  109-119, 
120-24. 

Blank  verse;  19,45-64.    See 

also  Rimeless  verse. 
Bridges,    Robert;    Milton's 

Prosody,  121-124. 
Browning,  E.  B.;  Sonnets 

from  the  Portuguese,  8*7  $ 

loose  rimes,  129. 
Browning,      Robert ;     One 

Word    More,    105,    107; 

Saul,  115,  117;  Abt  Vo- 

gler,  116. 
Byron;    Cain,    56-58;    The 

Corsair,  72;   septenaries, 

95. 

Chaucer;  pentameters,  31; 
heroic  verse,  77. 

Clough;  The  Bothie,  122. 

Coleridge ;  The  Nightin- 
gale, 58;  definitions  of 
prose  and  poetry,  63. 

Conflict,  law  of ;  in  tempo, 
16;  in  strong  and  weak 
stresses,  22;  in  number 
of  syllables,  34;  in 
pauses  in  blank  verse,  51- 
62;  do.  in  heroic  verse, 
70,  74;  in  stanzas,  82-90; 
in  short  metres,  91;  in 
long  metres,  96;  in  tro- 


chaic verse,  107;  in  ana- 
paestic, 114. 

Dactyl,  dactylic;  see  Ana- 
paest, Anapaestic. 
Drayton;  46. 
Dryden;  73,  77. 

Emphasis  ;  distinguished 
from  rhythmic  stress,  36. 

Feet;  theory  of,  39-44;  in 
trochaic  verse,  101-104; 
in  anapaestic  and  dac- 
tylic verse,  120-124. 

French  influence;  on  pen- 
tameter, 32;  on  heroic 
verse,  68. 

Gilbert  ;    The    Pirates    of 

Penzance,  46. 

Goldsmith ;  heroic  verse,  69. 
Gray;  Elegy,  78-83. 

Henley  ;    Arabian    Nights, 

99. 

Heroic  verse;  19,  65-77. 
Hovering  accent;  37. 
Hunt,  Leigh;  heroic  verse, 

77. 

Iambic  Verse;  see  Pen- 
tameter, Blank  verse, 
Heroic  verse,  etc. 

Iambus;  40,  41. 

Ingelow,  Jean;  119. 


141 


142 


Index 


Inversions;  in  iambic  verse, 
96-30;  in  trochaic,  106, 
109. 

Keats;  Endymion,  67;  La- 
mia,  73. 

Kipling;  The  Last  Chan- 
tey, 120. 

Longfellow;  Hiawatha,1019 
105,  107. 

Metre;  distinguished  from 
rhythm,  10-14.  See  also 
Pentameter,  Octosyllab- 
ics, Three-stress  verse, 
Alexandrine,  Septenary, 
Anapaestic,  Trochaic, 
Miscellaneous. 

Milton;  inversions  in,  29, 
30 ;  II  Penseroso,  31 ;  syl- 
labic principle  in,  32;  va- 
riety of  stresses,  46-48; 
variety  of  pauses,  49  ff. 

Miscellaneous  Metres;  119, 
120. 

Octosyllabics;  in  //  Pense- 
roso, 31;  symmetry  of, 
45;  need  of  rime  in,  96- 
99. 

Onomatopoesis;  134. 

Paragraph,  rhythmical;  in 
blank  verse,  53,  60-62;  in 
heroic  verse,  75. 

Parsons,  James  C.;  Eng- 
lish Versification,  8. 

Pauses,  variety  in;  48-62; 
in  trochaic  verse,  107. 
See  also  Conflict,  Law  of. 

Pentameter,  iambic;  19-44; 
superiority  of,  45,  91. 
See  also  Blank  verse, 
Heroic  verse. 


Periods,  rhythmical  ;  11. 
See  also  Conflict,  Law  of. 

Phillips,  Stephen;  34. 

Phrasing;  55-62;  in  ana- 
paestic verse,  115. 

Pope;  68-70. 

Prose,  rhythm  of;  4-12,  17. 

Pyrrhic  ;  41;  in  iambic 
verse,  42-44. 

Quantity;  in  classical  verse, 
40.  See  also  Tempo. 

Rhythm;  defined,  2;  origin 
of,  3,  7;  in  prose,  4-9; 
in  verse,  14-17;  distin- 
guished from  metre,  10- 
14. 

Rime;  effects  of,  in  pen- 
tameter verse,  65-90 ; 
decorative  and  structural 
functions  of,  66;  need  of, 
in  most  verse,  97-100, 
115;  laws  of,  125-130. 

Rimeless  verse;  97-100. 

Rossetti;  sonnets,  85-90. 

Scansion;  see  Feet. 

Septenary;  95-97. 

Shakespeare ;  blank  verse 
in  late  plays,  58. 

Shelley;  Alastor,  38;  Ado- 
nais,  83;  The  Cloud,  112; 
The  Sensitive  Plant,  113; 
loose  rimes,  126,  127. 

Sonnet,  the;  84-90. 

Spenser,  Spenserian  stan- 
za; 83-84. 

Spondee  ;  41  ;  in  iambic 
verse,  43. 

Stanza- forms;  77-90. 

Stress,  rhythmical;  4;  dis- 
tinguished from  empha- 
sis, 36 ;  on  weak  syllables, 


Index 


'43 


6,  35,  111-114  ;  va- 
riety in,  46-48. 

Surrey;  Aeneid,  49,  51. 

Swinburne;  Hesperia,  118; 
Super  Flumina  Babylo- 
nis,  119;  Atalanta,  136. 

Syllables,  number  of;  in 
verse  and  prose,  12;  in 
pentameter,  30-35. 

Tempo;  variety  in,  14,  15; 

in     different     kinds     of 

verse,  111. 
Tennyson  ;      Ulysses,     15  ; 

Parody  on  Wordsworth, 

23;  extra  syllables  in,  34; 

Maud,    92  ;    Idylls,    94  ; 

Locksley  Hall,  106;  loose 


rimes,  126, 130;  The  Lady 

of  Shalott,  130. 
Three-stress   iambic   verse ; 

91-94. 
Time     element     in     verse. 

See  Rhythm,  Tempo. 
Tone-color;  130-139. 
Trochaic  verse;  101-109. 
Trochee;  41. 

Watson;  Wordsworth's 
Grave,  82. 

Whittier;  Snowbound,  98. 

Wolfe;  The  Burial  of  Sir 
John  Moore,  110. 

Wordsworth  ;  parody  on, 
23;  Peele  Castle,  82;  son- 
nets, 88;  loose  rimes,  129. 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 
BERKELEY 

Return  to  desk  from  which  borrowed. 
This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below. 


1947 

210ct'49CS 


" 


anSlCII 


JUL  3  1  1954 


C'D  LD 


ilAD 

nHH 


MAR  2  7  1956  LU 


AN  "6  1959 


FEB  7     1955 


LD  21-100m-9,'47(A5702sl6)476 


MA«  40 

16Mar'64LM 


73 


THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


